Normal to Reality
by MidnightCereal
Summary: Look at me. I'm right here.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Prologue

By MidnightCereal

Second Lieutenant Maya Ibuki was home. This, a simple innocent germ of knowledge, grew into a feat of great accomplishment when magnified under the context of her current life station; this was to say she had a more important place to be than her parent's house in Amagi, Fukuoka Prefecture. Maya had a more important reason to be at that more important place.

"How was the flight?"

"Fine, mom." By fine, Maya meant fast. "So he's still up there, huh?"

Mom's face squirmed, and she shook her head as if slowed by the inertia of heavy memories. She was, probably. "I just don't know what else. I wouldn't have called if I could get to him. He won't…your father stopped trying a while ago. But Kenta listens to you."

"Well, it looks like it's my job to get him out, then, doesn't it?"

As they stood in the foyer, mom fidgeted, bunching and kneading the towel in her hands. "I wasn't trying to make this your responsibility, honey. God, I know you're so busy, and I bothered you with this. I'm sorry-"

"It's not a big deal. And it's not your fault. You're not the one who shut yourself in your room for weeks on end. I just used some of my emergency leave, that's all."

Ritsuko had stared bug-eyed at Maya for what felt like half an eternity, then yelled at her for what seemed like the other half of that eternity. Then Ritsuko had sat and sagged and thought, cupping her face and running her palms over her blonde hair with shallow brown roots.

Ritsuko had sighed, and granted her emergency leave.

Fifteen hours. That's all.

"I just wish dad was here. Who knows when I'll get the next chance to come back?"

Just for a second the older woman didn't sport that terrible frown. "He'll be here before dinner, just a short meeting with a client. Maybe we can all eat together, if…" Misses Noriko Ibuki trailed off as the cloud moved over her crow's feet once more.

"My flight won't be until ten-thirty tonight. That's plenty of time." The young Nerv officer leaned forward and kissed the top of her mother's graying head before padding up to the second floor.

"Maya, you like katsudon, don't you?"

"Katsudon's my favorite. But anything's good." This was as close to gospel truth that the twenty-four year-old technician ever wanted to get. Anything other than carry-out rice noodles out of styrofoam trays or her own culinary disasters, attempts to replicate her mother's recipes that always ended up looking like the vomit of the genuine article. This was reason enough to be happy she was home.

_I am happy_, she realized as she reached the top stair landing. It wasn't just the prospect of an actual, honest-to-God home-cooked meal. Finally, she was home and there was something here that could be easily fixed. Here the stakes weren't the continued existence of humanity, or at the very least the lives of fourteen year-old soldiers who were _far_ too old to ever be actual children.

She navigated the dim hallway which smelled like pine, like when she was five years old and seventeen years old. It smelled like Playstation and pillow fights, week-long groundings and chicken pox. Like breaking news from NHK, mommy collapsing from despair. Like Spring Festival. Like Prom.

Not Senior Prom.

She stopped at his door, right across from her own childhood sanctuary. Sanctuaries were meant to be breached.

"Kenta?" she softly ventured while tapping on his door. "It's Oneesan. Let me get a look at you, I haven't seen you in, well, who's counting-"

"Two years, one month, sixteen days…" His voice was low and muffled. Deep like dad's now. Deeper. "…twenty-one hours."

"Look…I don't know how much longer this crazy mess'll go on at Nerv. It might be another two years before I get back to you. Let's make the most of this, okay, Ta-chan?" Maya twisted the western-style knob, gently shoved, and was gently rebuffed. Well, of _course_ he locked it. If he hadn't she wouldn't have had to fly back home in the first place, would she have?

The young Lieutenant had internalized many wonderful, practical things under Sempai, the sub, and supreme commanders. Like devising contingency plans. Like not taking no for an answer.

The lock yielded as the key scraped inside of it, and when the oldest surviving Ibuki sibling pushed this time, she was rewarded with reflective weightless motes of dust swimming in filtered sunlight, and warm funk. And stale funk. There were several other species of funk well represented in Kenta Ibuki's personal disaster area, but Maya could not place them. Also, she did not want to.

Kenta himself sat on his futon, sour and scruffy with clammy-looking skin. Short black bristles circled his frowning mouth and chin in a fledgling goatee. His brown eyes were heavy with ineffectual wrath, and were very nearly hidden by a wild black mane and the bowed angle of his head.

_He looks like a rock star_, his sister thought, _a skinny hobo rock star_.

"Who the hell gave you a key?"

Familiar adolescent choler immediately rose within her like nitrogen bubbles, but it was way too early to get the bends. "I helped install that lock with Uncle Miyabi, remember? You knew he had arthritis."

"No I didn't."

"_Fine_." Before picking her way through the ubiquitous floor clutter to stand at the center of the room, Maya pushed the door closed. "I want you to tell me why you smell like my clothes hamper."

"Because you insist on wearing briefs; told you boxers would solve that problem-"

"I'm not taking the bait," she quietly informed him, clearing some musty jeans and a grimy PSP from his computer chair, indignation from her mind. She sat and tried to look into him. "You get snarky, you get a bit cynical. But you are no hikikomori."

He shrugged and scratched his…himself. "Maybe I am and you just don't know it yet. How _would_ you know, anyway? It's not like you're ever here."

"Except right now, right? Aren't I?"

Kenta bit his tongue and looked to a poster on a far, dirty wall, where a perky anime idol was bent ov- oh _God_, what was she _doing_? Is that even possible in real life?

"What hurt you?"

"I don't feel good. That's all."

"Because…why?"

He wiped at his unwashed face. "I'm not _hurt_."

Big sister nodded and licked her lips. "You, know what you're not getting? Our kids, our pilots, I work with them everyday, talk to them. I'm not really friends with any of them, and I'm no therapist, but for my job I have to know them better than they know themselves, maybe. _Not_ maybe. And they can laugh and joke, they smile. Well…two of them. They've got brave faces they've been practicing since they were old enough to walk, and they still can't fool me. So stop trying to fool me, Ta-chan."

"Then I won't try. I just won't tell you." He snorted. "Fuckin' orator…"

"_Now_…" Maya managed through her gritted teeth, "…you are being unreasonable."

He leaned back on his sloppy bed and laughed like steel wool on a blackboard. "Well, you know what? I'm sorry about that, really. Sorry I'm not cooperating with your tight-ass schedule."

"_Kenta_-"

"Sorry it's inconveniencing you to sit here, and you can't fit 'troubleshooting younger brother's nose-dive-from-ten-thousand-meters flaming wreckage of a social life' in before going back home. To your _real_ home. And I don't want to waste anymore of your time."

"_What?_" Maya upturned her sweaty palms and glanced around the room, but she failed at finding the inexhaustible source of her brother's misplaced anger. "You're _not_ a waste of time," she tried assuring him, shaking her head.

"Go. No one's stopping you. And you don't want to keep _Ritsuko_ waiting, right?"

Now, she may have played the meek, subservient underling to strong-willed and snappish black heart superiors, but she had never, not even once, taken any crap from her baby brother. "You'll do _real_ well by keeping Sempai's name out of your smart mouth."

"What the _hell_, Maya? What do you want me to say? We phone like once every other month and we got email and every other damned word is 'Ritsuko'. Who _is_ she, your pimp?"

In her mind suddenly, was the long, tapering, smiling maw of a saltwater crocodile. _Okay, then. If that's the way you want it, time to put in the starting lineup._

Maya started sweetly, "You know what I want you to say. But you want to know a secret? I already know your answer."

Kenta had the good sense to look up with a start. He gave a hiccupping sound, freezing with cold dread.

"Mom already told me about Haruka, over the phone. And she knows because Haruka's mother told her that you and her broke up-"

"WE DIDN'T BREAK UP!" he snapped. She jumped. "SHE GOT TIRED OF ME, AND THE BITCH DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH DECENCY TO EVEN TELL ME TO MY FACE!"

"Thank you," Maya managed, "that's a start."

"What the _fuck_ do you mean 'that's a start'? You already knew! What was the point of that?"

"To get you to open your mouth."

"Well I _did_. Happy? I opened my mouth and words came out. Enough dirty, filthy words to get you out of my room. Because I need to be alone." Kenta just…deflated. The morose teen suffered a grimace wile lowering his gangly frame onto his cluttered mattress.

"What you need is some perspective."

"I see. Or I _don't_, because I need 'perspective'. Duly noted, Lieutenant Sis." He rolled like pulled taffy so his back was to her. "See you in two years."

Maya Ibuki had had enough. "Kenta Ibuki…GROW UP. I am sitting here talking to you while God-knows-what is going on at Nerv! I came all the way back here just for _you_, and for all I know all my friends and my coworkers are all being blown away, they all could be dying right _now_ to save _you_. That's how much I care. You're doing everything in your power to piss away all that sympathy and it's not making any sense."

"I didn't _ask_ anyone for sympathy-"

"Breaking news, Kenta! Locking yourself in your room, starving yourself and refusing to take a bath for three weeks, and snapping at your mother and sister is generally considered a big _fat_ cry for help!"

Appropriately enough, he began to cry.

Maya reached out but stopped halfway to his jerking shoulders, unhappily settling back in her chair to watch him quietly sob. "It's okay to cry."

Kenta managed to sound stupefied, heartbroken, and pathetic. "Oh, really? _That's_ what I'm doing? And this whole time I've been in here I thought I was just _laughing my ass off_!"

"Let me finish. I said it's okay to cry, but don't ever try to convince me all…_this_ is fine. You are _not_ dying. I didn't die, nothing happened to mom or dad…" And here Maya winced, "and you weren't like this when Koji died. So this has to stop. Tell me everything you want to. Tell me _everything_, period. Then I want you to come out, take a shower. I want you to eat dinner with mom and dad and me. And when I get my bag and I'm walking out the front gate to catch my plane, I want to turn back to the door and see you waving from it. I love you. But you are going to have to give me something."

The boy gave her something over his still back. The finger.

That's what he was; still just a boy. That's where she had gone wrong. Maya had tried reasoning with him as though he was even remotely capable of substantial, logical, linear thought. So she finally gave in and laughed at him.

"So how much longer do you think you can stay up here and pretend like the world has ended? Another week? A month more? There's only one person in this room that has any idea what the end of the world looks like, and it's sure as hell not you."

"It's not my fault you're the older one-"

"_Shut up_. Take my advice now, because I might not be around in two years. I might not be around in two _months_. You could die two _minutes_ from now. _All_ of us. That's our world, right now. Get _out_ of here. If Haruka growing apart from you and not getting to see me are the worst problems you have in the next year, treat it as a miracle. That's what I do. This…this _bullshit_ is not a problem. You're only seventeen."

He did not speak, breathe, or move at first. Then he slowly did all three, turning over to fix her with a cryogenic glare. "What did you just say?"

The woman couldn't help but balk at the hint of cold sharp steel in his permafrost tone. "Kenta…all I was saying was-"

"That I'm seventeen? Only seventeen? Okay. I'm only seventeen." Maya Ibuki took in a strained breath, not sure she liked where he was going with this until he spoke again, and allowed her to justify the fear the direction of the argument began to instill in her. "You had Prom when you were seventeen, didn't you?"

Suddenly, she could not breathe at all. "You…you said you'd never talk about this again," she wheezed.

He sat up again. "_No_…I said I'd never tell mom and dad. And I didn't. But what's it matter? It was a long time ago, so it shouldn't be a problem bringing it up _now_."

Her throat tried closing as if she was choking on thick harsh dust, and she shook her head disbelievingly. She was being injured. By Kenta. "Why…why are you so _mad_ at me, Ta-chan? I came here to help. It's _me_, you can trust me. I wouldn't hurt you. Why are you trying to hurt_me_?"

He wagged a finger as his eyes, glowing with tainted glee, locked on their misting counterparts. "You misunderstand. It's not like I'd bring up something _important_. Yeah, you loved your date even though you knew he was slime. And he ditched you midway through the second dance to bang the class slut-"

"I-I have a job to do. Why can't you just accept that? I wasn't _ignoring_ you. Please-"

Kenta had leaned forward, and he was nearly standing now as he homed in on the wavering, wilting kill. "Sure you had to walk back home the three kilometers, and you were so depressed that I caught you trying to O.D. on aspirin a week later. But, hey, what's the big deal? It isn't like it was anything more than a speed bump on your way to bigger and better things, and even though you didn't eat for three damn days it's all water under the bridge, because YOU WERE ONLY SEVENTEEN!"

Maya would later recall blinking, just once, and when her eyes opened again she was towering over his prone, bedridden form, her palm hot and stinging, her quivering frame fueled by high-octane rage and oxygenated by ragged breaths.

Something moved over his face as the shock and pain dissolved. Maya knew what it was, and knew it was one breached, unspoken promise, one betrayal too late. Too late to acknowledge it. Too late to care that he was rising now and tugging on her wrist as she turned, stubbing her toe on a camouflaged dumbbell in her mission to rip his door off and escape his vile snake pit.

"I just got tired of people leaving, Maya. Wait."

Too late.

"I was sick of it! I was just mad and I don't even really know why. I'm sorry. I'm just _so sorry_. I'll go wash up. Let's eat, okay? Make the most of this, right? _Wait_..."

She nearly snarled while ripping her thin forearm from his poison grip. She didn't feel like katsudon, anyway. She had to go home, to her _real_ home, to her real life and her real work. Three more steps, then down the stairs to kiss mom goodbye, and get on the bus to the train for the airport; then a call to Nerv to change her itinerary, and she'd be debugging subroutines five hours from now.

"I'm _sorry_. You know I am. Don't leave. _Oneesan_, _please_…"

She stopped at the door and took a deep, steadying breath…

Too late.

"You can just die in here, Kenta."

And as far as Maya knew, he did.

* * *

Doctor Maya Ibuki tried not being offended she was being ignored and succeeded for the most part. The five years since Third Impact were not satisfied with passing merely for the sake of accumulation, and eroded her acute empathy for anything and everything, dulling her sensitivity to the real and perceived slights inflicted by the lilum…people…whatever.

She should have endured enough withering glares from cutthroat contemporaries envious of her brains and her success (and perhaps her looks), and enough condescending, patronizing denouncements of her life's work by shortsighted and sexist superiors, to earn not giving a rat's ass what the man in front of her thought. She wouldn't have cared had he been most people.

Shinji Ikari was not most people. Sure, she had only been grocery shopping when Not Most People entered her line of sight in the condiments aisle, deliberating between brands of paprika. Maya was very certainly not the most important person the young man knew from his Nerv days. However, it became obvious as she spoke his politely vacant smiling and head nodding were afterthoughts, and that…irked her.

"Is there someone behind me? Who're you looking at?"

Something was wrong. Maya wondered just how he was able to look so focused with eyes so dull as he turned his attention from "No one" over her shoulder and back to her. "So you're okay with Kensuke coming to you for advice? I'm sorry for pointing him in your direction. I know he can be…"

_Persistent. Enthusiastic. Thorough. Ambitious. Tenacious. Anno- _

"Persistent," Maya decided, moving to the side so that a woman could pass by with her small, petulant daughter, who wasn't going to get Loco Puffs © cereal when she had Loco Puffs © at home, so honey, I'm not buying Loco Puffs © until you finish what you already have _and don't you make that face at me_, young lady!

Kensuke was an entry-level intelligence officer for Nerv Security, which were essentially the toothless remnants of Section-2. Hearing the young Aida speak and watching him move gave the impression double agents still roamed Nerv's labyrinthine halls, that at any given moment nigh-omnipotent extraterrestrial colossi would besiege headquarters with a vast and varied array of particle beam and kinetic energy weaponry.

Watching Kensuke, Maya could pretend half the human population was not already billions of points of crimson light affecting a lunar orbit.

The truth was nobody was needed to watch over the last surviving Evangelion pilot, and everyone that was still alive and had reason to care thought this was a very good thing.

"You wouldn't be apologizing if you knew how hard it is to find enthusiastic people to work there, now. Too bad he isn't into computers, or he could've worked right under me."

His eyebrows knitted oddly enough. "Yeah, too bad."

She had to ask. She'd ask, and he'd lie, and she'd have to accept it. She did not have to like it, though.

"So things…how are things? You're doing okay, Shinji?"

"I'm just…" He froze, and just as suddenly thawed. "I'm good. Classes aren't that tough this semes-"

She didn't like it. Maya justified her hypocrisy by reasoning she had no obligation to pay attention to what he said was going on with his life, when it was no different from what she already knew. It was how he told her about his continued education in architecture at Tokyo-3 University, his part-time job as a freelance cello instructor, his unwavering commitment to just existing, that pulled fire alarms in her head as she mutely nodded.

The young man had a metaphysical biologist for a mother and a geneticist for a father, and now it seemed as if he had turned apathy into a science as well.

"-ust existing, Iguess. But don't think I'm complaining or anything. I don't mind being bored."

_You're not just bored. You're hiding something._

He chuckled. She wished he hadn't. She wished he would stop lying to her. She wished that the pervasive wrongness beneath the placid surface of his maturing face was only the byproduct of the all-nighter she had pulled finalizing a proposal the night before.

Then he looked at nothing beyond her shoulder.

The truth was nobody was needed to watch over the last surviving Evangelion pilot, and everyone that was still alive and had reason to care thought this was a very good thing.

Except Maya. And perhaps also the anno…persistent entry-level intelligence officer that came between her and a generous bowlful of raspberry sorbet as she sank into her couch later that night.

"The NO-B Security procedural?" she asked, blinking at Kensuke's request and the soft burst of static from the receiver at her ear. The burst came again and she realized he was exerting himself somehow. Maya tried remembering her first days and weeks as a layman officer under Ritsuko Akagi, and for the life of her could not recall being so damned energetic. "You've been a NO-A level nine for maybe two months…and you're already thinking about a promotion?"

He huffed again. "They just have me on detail for the infirmary wing…and that's if I'm good. And you know what's exciting about monitoring closed circuit cameras in the cafeteria?"

"No. What?"

"Miss I_bu_ki…" he whined. She could almost see him glaring over the top of his glinting silver frames. Oh, how that was ever creepy. "Can't you just make a copy of the report for me? _Please?_ I have the IBD number!"

How did he get _that_?

"Does it really matter _how_ I got it?" Kensuke answered almost offhandedly.

Yes it did, actually. In all likelihood, he copped the document I.D. from an unwitting desk clerk in the research center on the eighth level (Mirielle was a sweet woman, really, just not the sharpest prog knife in the arsenal, was all). This was very likely, and as perfectly innocent as that woman who presented herself as secretary to a supposedly secret U.N. envoy that had visited Central Dogma three months ago…and then presented the security detail that intercepted her halfway to the diplomats with a perfectly innocent briefcase bomb.

Maya cut the memory before it could cut her, but not before she was reminded of her uncanny, peerless ability to cripple any and all vestiges of her good mood. She considered his request while gazing pensively at the bowl of chilled sorbet sucking the warmth from her lap. The heat from her thighs was already liquefying it, the red syrup pooling around an island of cream, a monochrome moat. She began nursing it before it entirely melted down.

_Hmm…meltdown… _

"Kensuke, I'll tell you what; I drop the whole potentially fatal breach of security issue if you tell me what's going on with Shinji."

Distorted white silence came between them for a moment. "Why? What's going on with Shinji?"

Maya sighed and rolled her eyes up to tall shadows looming in a corner of her apartment living room. "Look, I _know_ you're the best friend he has left. _Only_ friend, maybe. What do you know about him?"

"Just whatever he tells me."

"Well, okay…what does he tell you?"

"Nothing." He must have sensed her growing agitation with his sudden evasiveness. "Would you believe me if I said I wasn't the one he really confided in? Still isn't? That was really Touji's thing, after what happened to his sister."

"Touji isn't here…and I cannot believe I just said that."

"But you're right, though," he tiredly conceded. "It's okay. It's that…Shinji just never tells me _anything_. That's how it's almost always been, so I never really bother trying to understand him anymore. You know how he is."

"Actually…no I don't. And that's pretty much the point. But you'd tell me if he was in some type of trouble?"

"You wouldn't even have to make it an order."

Without warning, something fearful seized her gut. "_Talk_ to him, Kensuke."

End of Prologue

A/N: I'm back…well, sorta. _Normal to Reality_ will have seven more installments. I am currently finishing chapter three, and will try to post one finished chapter per week, as I have always done. I know how just about everything is going to go, but the second half of the story might be a little slow in coming. You know how it is. Yes you do, don't lie.

Random A/N: I ended up getting two bags of Jolly Ranchers for Trick or Treaters. None came, so I had the bags to myself, and took it upon myself to eat all the green and red ones so as to appease the teeth-rotting gods. Now, they represent sour apple, cherry and watermelon, I believe. And purple Jolly Ranchers are grape-flavored…supposedly. Then there are the blue ones. What? What fruit are they supposed to represent, blue balls? Help me out here, people.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	2. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 1

By MidnightCereal

"You know how dirty these things are?"

"No. But you're going to tell me right now, aren't you?"

"I'm doing you a public service. There isn't enough Pinesol and bleach in the world to keep this train from being a bacterial death trap."

"A death trap? Like my cubicle's a death trap? Like my passenger seat was a death trap, and my living room? And my two year-old daughter?"

"Did she or did she not eat that cricket?"

"You know the funniest thing about this? You're not even a hypochondriac. You don't wear gloves or a mask or even have a handkerchief. You pick your nose when you don't think anyone's looking. So just get on the train and just shut up today. Just…shut up."

"Well, don't blame me one day when you find your…shit."

"When I find my _what_?"

"Holy shit…"

"_What?_"

"Look, he's…is he dead?"

"He's breathing."

"Holy shit, I _know_ him…he's bleeding."

"He works for Nerv, too. Great, there's a med station a block from here."

"Not anymore. But there's a CALBOX at the front gate."

"He's just fifteen. Wait...he's…"

"Holy shit…"

"Will you _stop_ saying that?"

* * *

Kensuke Aida liked being prepared, no matter how sickeningly benign a non-situation was, which more often than not made his coworkers sickeningly annoyed. He liked calling it **Surveillance and Assessment of All Probable Contingencies**; sometimes his coworkers called it something that made it sound significantly less official, and sometimes they called it things the sandy-haired officer chose not to dwell on. He wanted to be in a _good_ mood when he talked to Shinji.

_Doesn't he ever want to be in a good mood when he talks to me?_ Aida helplessly wondered. He openly stared at his friend's profile as the former pilot's blank gaze drifted listlessly over the paint-chipped guard rail and down to the ground below. It just felt right trying to talk to Shinji Ikari on the roof of a building. Nearly every meaningful conversation the bifocaled young man had- or tried to have had- with the Nerv veteran had taken place on top of their junior high school. "What're we standing on, again?"

"It's the architecture school." Shinji folded his bare arms across the top bar and rested his chin on top of them. "My cubicle's on this side, two floors down."

Kensuke was thankful for the silent breeze as it slipped past him. The seasons may have been back, but summer was summer was summer. "Isn't it weird, though? No matter what job you go to you always end up behind a desk?"

A twitch from a nervous puppet master; the taller black-haired man quickly shrugged his thin shoulders. "If I do my work right, sometimes it's like you end up someplace else, anyway."

"Man…" Kensuke shook his head, looking up and away nostalgically while working on his preconceived notion. "I just wish I coulda joined up during the war, you know? Just for something to do in between the paper work and coffee brewing."

Shinji raised his head to expose his sickly upturned mouth. "Something like fighting to the death or feeling like you had your arms blown off?" He paused and lowered his head back behind his arms. "Sorry."

"Otakus die hard, man. I deserved it. That's why you said it."

"So…this is why you brought me up here?" Shinji easily ventured.

"If you want to come down, you can speed this up by telling me why Miss Ibuki nominated me Mister Intervention. I'd like to think she loves my potential, but…"

Kensuke noticed him hesitate, then again before something finally spurred him into quiet narration. "I think I scared her when I kept zoning out on her at the grocery store."

For a moment Kensuke debated if celebrating the first meaningful conversation with Shinji Ikari since ninth grade was unfathomably pathetic. In the next moment, he realized he had spent a moment staring at Shinji, whose eyebrows bent in confusion. "What?"

Kensuke shrugged. "Maybe she just felt put off you were ignoring her. You'd have to be looking at something pretty interesting to not pay attention to someone who looks like that."

"I think Asuka's pretty interesting."

Ah. Progress.

Disturbing, disturbing progress.

Kensuke tried to laugh. "_You see dead people, Cole?_" he asked with a knowing, referential smirk.

"No. Just her."

The smirk vanished. All that could be heard above the aggregation of ambient aural pollution was the incessant shrieking of cicadas.

"I like Maya," Shinji began, "but she was talking about her work and it's always so complicated. I was never that good at all that math. And Asuka…Asuka kept talking over her. You know how she is."

"Do you talk _back_ to her? Tell me you don't…" His finger tips were numb.

"Something tells me that wouldn't be a good idea. Really, I don't want to know if she can hear me. If she could…would that make me less crazy or more crazy?"

Aida shook his head and stared. "I'm _really_ not…qualified to answer that."

Shinji's eyes were stationed somewhere around his friend's heart, and then turned back to again peer over the edge. "I think I was asking myself as much as I was asking you. I'm just…living, you know, Kensuke? It doesn't matter whether or not I see her. It doesn't change the fact I'm still alive. I've seen her ever since I stepped off that beach, when I eat lunch, or I'm in class, on the bus or the train. I'm still breathing. It doesn't affect anything."

There was some way to refute that obvious, naked lie. Someone somewhere had intimate, supreme knowledge of the how's itemizing the unmitigated deconstruction of…whatever it was that made somebody like Shinji think this was okay. Kensuke was not that person. He had been prepared, but not for this. Arguments made proposals and he turned them down before unhappily settling on stating the insultingly obvious.

"That shouldn't be normal, Shinji."

"It is for me."

"…Do you see her _now_?"

"No."

So what else do you say to something so disconcertingly, impossibly…impossible?

"I don't…I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything." Shinji's plastic stare never left the pavement five stories below. "If she leaves…she'll leave on her own. It's out of my hands, and that makes it okay. That's all I have to know about myself. Do you understand that?"

"No." Aida was as close to understanding the Third Child now as he was when the largest, angriest stooge had published his displeasure all over the newcomer's right cheek, nearly six years, two schools, and one extinction-level event ago.

How did this get so complicated so fast? Despite his scripted chicken hawk lament for a war he had the pleasure of never fighting, Kensuke was now thankful on at least twelve different levels he hadn't been drafted the Sixth Child. There were enough people left from five years ago for Kensuke Aida to hear stories; being part of the old Section-2 meant knowing where Rei and Asuka and Shinji were, who they were with, what they were eating, what they were saying.

Why they were crying.

Why they were screaming.

Why they were tearing their rooms apart in choleric fits of adolescent rage.

Why they were staring –just _staring_- for seconds and minutes and hours…

And then the veterans would shake their heads in disbelief and speak in hallowed, haunted tones about alternate universes microns thick, cloned albinos that could fly…_fly_, embryonic Angels fused to human flesh, and Children solidifying from a few orange splashes of congealing LCL. Then they would stare at nothing for seconds and minutes…

But Shinji lived through all that! He was strong enough, wasn't he? He was a functioning adult, a dedicated student, a hard worker. Shinji Ikari was normal _enough_, right?

Kensuke slid his finger over the scrap paper in his pocket as the questions encased his mind in a slug of cascading mud. Giving Shinji that piece of paper –and the name and address scribbled on it- meant they were going to be someone else's questions soon. He couldn't decide yet if that was fair to her. But Kensuke produced it, anyway. He held it out, and his troubled friend eyed it with achingly subtle wariness. Why? What the hell did he think it was? A letter bomb?

"What's this?"

"It's someone who wants to know you completely." _I hope…_

Shinji reached out to it before his hand receded like a boom. Kensuke knew he was going to do that. "I-I don't think…I don't know-"

"_Will you just take it?_" the veteran otaku tiredly pressed. "Would I even be giving this to you if she didn't want to see you?"

Much too slowly, Shinji came back with, "No. You wouldn't."

"I'm not Touji. And I don't have a sister who was crushed by masonry who was used to damn-near blackmail me into piloting Eva." The man with glasses internally cringed. "But _I'm_ the one that came back. I'm the one that's trying to help. What's this going to hurt?"

"I can't tell, yet."

But Shinji held his hand out anyway, and Kensuke shoved the parchment into the half-closed fist. He pointed at it. "She came back too. Will you keep that in mind?"

Kensuke –shamelessly, audibly- exhaled when his personal hero wordlessly stuffed the name and place in his own shorts. "One day you're gonna have to tell me how you do it, Ikari. You're not even trying and you get to see _two_ beautiful women…"

* * *

Three. _Three_ beautiful women.

Sometimes he saw Misato, too. Sometimes she talked to him, too.

Shinji Ikari never talked back to her, either.

**s in the case of stain-glass windows. Unfortunately, vaulted load-bearing walls would be severely overstrained. By transferring the load to an external ar **

It was well enough he did not mention his former guardian to Kensuke, as the occurrences of Major Katsuragi frequenting his immediate vicinity had recently become…well…less frequent.

**uvais, Le Mans, as well as Paris' Notre Dame, where flying buttresses combined functionality and ornate, aesthetic appeal. Most apparent in th**

He had been the lone passenger on a train, slumping against the bay window, allowing his slack eyes to drift over the blending foreground. There was a rushing tide of sound and then the endless maw of the Geofront, basking in the amber of an artificial dusk. He remembered an nth degree of indifference to the awesome sight which was nurtured by familiarity and innumerable fresh brutalities. He remembered an honorable Nerv discharge being ten minutes and three security checkpoints away.

"_How's it going, dummkopf?_"

He remembered looking at her as a piece of his brain splintered. He remembered her sapphire eye, because it had been slick and glinting, and filled with mischief. And life. Not like the rest of her -her matted locks of auburn mange or her ruined arm- permeated by the anti-glow of death half-warmed. As if some dumbass undertaker had buried her with an open coffin, and she had crawled out, intent on chewing his negligent ass off.

**ering, wooden frames constructed by carpenters, that temporarily supported and defined the shape of the eventual ston **

He remembered being too lost in back draft delirium to be grateful no one else had been present in the car to watch and hear him scream. A sooty black had raced in from the periphery of his vision, and he remembered nothing.

When he had woken, Asuka was gone. So were the splinters.

And maybe that was why he had grown accustomed to it. He had no other reasonable explanation for why he didn't scream anymore, why he hadn't bothered to even blink when –not even a week later- Misato had sat across from him as he ate a shrimp bento at school.

"_I wish I could just touch you. That's all. Just once. Maybe it could change things. Just once..._"

He had almost forgotten how he had shuddered, then stilled himself before swallowing a clump of jasmine rice. Just an aberration, a spectral heart massage. She couldn't touch him, and he didn't have to talk to her. Treat it like a video diary; sooner or later, she'd have to sign off.

**isted into place. Finally, the newwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

The splinters were gone. Picked away or clipped and tossed out so that the rest could be filed and sanded down and lacquered. A finished gleaming slate, as if nothing had ever happened. No more Eva, no more Nerv, no more Father. No more splinters.

Just him. And the **w's**.

Shinji allowed the present to reclaim him. He removed his heavy fingers from the keyboard and the cursor in the white screen finally paused to take catch its breath. His rusty gate glare swung over to Kensuke's scratch paper laying to the right of the glowing monitor. As the screen illuminated his apartment bedroom in cascading hues, he thought.

No…Kensuke had no reason to worry about his mental health, or lack thereof, because the only thing that made Shinji want to kill himself was this assignment.

Yes…he had felt something when he had read the name on the paper.

No…he did not know what it was that he had felt.

Yes…something might possibly come of it, something wonderful that would make him feel…just _feel_. Like Yukie had tried to make him feel, with her words and her eyes, her lips and her breasts. In the end, she had been the one that had strong feelings.

"_Fuck you, robot._" Her words, eyes, lips, breasts, venonmous, glaring, sneering, heaving.

Worst of all, she had left with his cake. It had been a good cake.

No…he had no idea who would call him at twelve-sixteen at night.

_God, just please don't let it be Yukie again._

"It's me," Maya bashfully pointed out when he answered his phone. "You said you stay up pretty late, so I thought it'd be okay." There was a pause. "Is it?"

He softly answered, "I don't mind," and then looked away from his monitor, swiveling slowly in his seat so the flickering glow slid into darkening shades of indigo and then voracious carbon black. He was oddly, genuinely pleased he had been fully prepared to see shadows in the corner of his room that probably shouldn't have been there. If these walls truly could talk, he'd ask them what to say next.

"Um…so what's on your mind?" Nice.

"I just…you talked with Kensuke today? How'd that go?"

"I think he's trying to find me a date. And I guess it could be more awkward, but I know her already. From…school." Where was this going?

She took a breath that was faintly unstable. "Well…you deserve it. To be happy, I mean. Be happy, Shinji."

He mouthed 'okay' to himself before he said it over the phone. There was a gentle crash of static as the Nerv scientist laid her own receiver in its cradle. Then a dial tone. As he prepped himself for another hour of cramping his fingers and ruining his eyesight, Shinji Ikari mouthed another word. Perhaps he could convince himself that living dreams of two of the most important people in his former life constituted even abstract normalcy, but a midnight drive-by phoning by Maya Ibuki was just too-

* * *

"Weird."

"What's weird, Hikari?"

The woman in question shrugged even though her friend was out of sight and making clattering, clinking noises in a back storage room.

Hikari Horaki, undergraduate Keio University occupational therapist, surveyed the sterile enclosure with a half-dozen sweeping glances and crinkled her nose. Something smelled like sulfur. "I've been going here for more than a year. I never knew they had all these chemistry labs."

"They didn't have them not too long ago, not until they expanded their environmental information department. You still wouldn't know all this stuff was here if you hadn't visited me."

"Yeah. I guess so."

The woman in the back gave a short laugh, followed by what sounded like rubber gloves snapping. "This is gonna sound so mean…why _are_ you visiting me? It's just…we talk like once every two weeks, now. We live in the _same_ apartment, and this is the most I've seen of you since last Friday."

"I'm sorry about that-"

Her friend cut her off, "Nah…I know you're busy and all," and sighed. "Always so freakin' busy. What's that say about me if I make it all personal?"

In the short pregnant pause that followed, Hikari glanced to the open doorway leading to the empty main corridor.

"So are you waiting for something, Hikari? You never answered me."

"No." _Someone_. "Maybe I can help you with some of this stuff?"

"Uh…yeah. Sure. Thanks."

"What's this?"

"What's what?"

As the former junior high school class representative held two beakers up to an overhead fixture, refracted light tainted with deep and varying hues danced across her mahogany eyes. "Well, one of these has some blue liquid with little gold-looking flecks, the other's just red." She slightly swirled them. "So do I just pour these in the sink?"

"Sure. Why not? You like being on fire, right?"

Hikari stopped swirling. And put them down. Slowly. She looked back at the door again and clucked her tongue. Where _was_ he? It should have been a straight shot from Tokyo-3 on the Tokaido line…"What?"

"I said when I'm done back here, let's go see a movie. When was the last time we even did _that_?"

The freckled woman bit her lip, which led to hemming, which eventually gave way to hawing.

_Stall._

"Nothing's out I'm really interested in. You know I'm not a big movie person. And don't you want to…I don't know…take a shower?"

The voice in the back was briefly hijacked by real or feigned offence. "Just what're you trying to say, roomie?"

"N-nothing! I mean, you've been in this lab all day with all these chemicals…"

"Don't even pretend you don't like being around smelly people. I mean, you liked Touji, didn't y…_dammit_…"

"It's okay."

"I'm so sorry-"

"No, it's okay."

"I wasn't being serious. I didn't bring him up on purpose. It just slipped out."

"It's okay. I know."

The apologies got closer as their owner began making her way from the storage room. "I'm so stupid!"

"It's okay." It was, really. The brunette left the compassionate young man, her pigtails and Asuka, her sailor fuku and the city of Tokyo-3 with her turbulent adolescence. She bit back the guilt in her heart that surfaced when she thought of it that way, that somehow she was the one that had abandoned him. Hikari knew better, and began long ago to abolish stubborn, virulent strains of self-condemnation and bitterness. It was helped to a small degree thinking that wherever Touji now was, his sister would likely be close by.

The middle Horaki sibling had learned since to be content with seeing Touji Suzahara in soft flashes of fond remembrance, like the face that quickly poked in and out of the doorway in her peripheral vis-_THAT WAS HIM!_

* * *

This was a bad idea.

This was a bad idea.

This was a bad idea.

This was a bad idea.

Shinji saw her standing there in that lab, and could only think to duck back and find the nearest public restroom before she even knew he was there.

He ran away. Should've felt bad about it, didn't.

Kensuke didn't have a reason to lie; Shinji believed the young man with glasses who adamantly conveyed her desire to see him. But…to know him completely? No way, no one wanted that. _He_ didn't even want that, and the thought of someone else knowing about…

But she had been kind to him, always. And he was certain that with all her might she'd try to understand him.

This was a bad idea.

The Third Child turned from the hard face coolly staring him down in the bathroom mirror. It was more angular now than he would have liked, and he should have taken better care shaving. Shallow stubble hugged his jaw, a living shadow. Now he took great care not to scowl, because doing so meant someone else's face staring him down.

Shinji Ikari didn't want to think of it, did not have to. All he had to do was go to the bathroom, then get off the Keio campus and back on the Tokaido line to Tokyo-3. He'd use the train ride home to think of an excuse for why he had chickened ou…changed his mind.

The most important person in the history of the world finished his business, flushed, and zipped up.

And that was when he heard it.

It was fine sandpaper against a burred wood grain, an insect scuttling across the floor as its carapace scraped the bottom of the door…

The door.

He turned around in the stall –slowly, as if modeling his Izod on a rotating dais- and looked down. That was when he saw it.

A piece of folded red paper worked against every conceivable natural law, or at least every natural law forbidding inanimate objects from slowly propelling themselves to his frozen feet. The young man could only blink before Technicolor oil-slicks blotted the dry eyes he trapped behind his tight lids. That scraping sound, he could still hear it. When he again opened them, it was even closer.

Some shady invisible man was offering him some under-the-table deal, and he stupidly bent down to accept it.

_It's real._

It was opaque, precisely creased, and felt less coarse than it looked. It was real. His fingers were steady as he turned it over and over in his hand, running his thumb across the spine of the sharp fold. It had been folded with care. It had been folded with love.

It was _real_, oh God…

Shinji Ikari finally took a breath, first shallow, then rolling in the troughs and peaks of unseen waves. He unfolded it. He assessed the black-marker kanji written with the precision of someone still struggling to master the myriad characters. Then, he read it.

**Look at me. I'm right here…**

He read the very bottom, utterly numb.

…**dummkopf. **

And all at once, a diseased legion of harried, half-formed, nonsensical thoughts converged greedily on Shinji's mind, a murder of mangy crows. All of them led to the exact same action, him frantically tearing at the silver latch on the lavatory stall and very nearly tumbling out of the small compartment like he had been shoved. The Third Child caught himself from busting his sweaty forehead wide open on the slick countertop and looked up, the head on his and his reflection's neck swiveling in desperate sweeping arcs.

_She's right here. She just said so. Why can't I see her? WHY CAN'T I SEE HER?_

Something faintly shuffled to his right and he froze, vainly attempting to dampen the rhythmic pumping in his ribcage. He heard it again anyway, emanating from the stall next to his. One long, purposeful stride brought him there and he jostled the handle, which resisted.

Shinji was oddly confused by the voice that answered him, which was neither female nor German. "O-occupied!" It was, however, annoyed.

"Sorry, but please! You need to tell me something!"

The man became incredulity incarnate. "DUDE, WHAT…WHAT THE _FUCK_?"

"I-I have something here, it's…it's red, the paper's red! Did you see anyone in here with this? Did _you_ write this? Someone told you to do this?"

"YOU THINK I CAME IN HERE TO WRITE YOU POETRY, ASSHOLE?"

Shinji supposed not, a fact that did precisely nothing to tranquilize the burgeoning panic that had engulfed him like a pure oxygen flashover. All he knew for certain was that wherever she was, she wasn't here; he jerked into motion, crashing into the heavy lavatory door as his slow lope became a sloppy ramshackle sprint.

A tangerine tint streaked through a line of large windows in swaths of descending light that laminated the walls of the adjacent hallway. In the floor, diffuse nitrogen tank, trashcan, and vending machine doppelgangers patiently hung upside down, adjoined to their real-life counterparts. She was not to be found in either world.

_Here it is again. Splitting wooden whiskers, irritants._

He gulped a ragged clump of moist air and shot his searching gaze to the right, where perspective pinched the corridor into a small box at its faraway bookend. Shinji remembered struggling to match her long sauntering gait, which unfailingly reminded him of his place relative to hers…

_Needling intimate inflictions wriggling into me it's always where I am and I am here and it is always here and here and here and here and here…_

He ran to his left. Dogged vital questions chased him. She was doing this. _Why?_ Why was she doing this to him?

_Why is she punishing me?_

He rounded a corner to search for her. Or an exit.

He found neither.

"GLARPHH!" Hikari incomprehensively shrieked. She drew her arms away from her face when she realized a moment later the young man wasn't going to plow into her like some raging drunk. "_There_ you are! I thought that was you back there, where'd you go?"

"I…_huff_…I just, I …_wheeze_…phew…"

"Take your time…" He took for granted that nothing on the brunette's face –still peppered with a smattering of light freckles- gave any indication she thought it a bit odd he was blindly charging around a building filled with insanely volatile chemicals. The class representative always made things easy, allowed him to prep a suitable lie to fill the ensuing silence. A third voice beat him to it.

"Hikari, don't leave, _please_? You know I wouldn't say anything to hurt you, you…_know_…that…"

As the owner of the voice shut down her apology, bit her tongue and reassessed the current situation, Shinji stared at her.

Mana Kirishima stared back.

End of Chapter 1

A/N: Y'know, it wasn't until I had finished the first chapter I had realized; the one plot twist –Shinji seeing Asuka even though she's dead- sounds awfully similar to _The_ _Sixth Sense_. Oh well. I'm not changing it. I can safely say other than that, this story and M. Night Shyamalan's movie have nothing in common.

So…yeah. Mana's in this story. Lots of things can happen, though; perhaps she and Shinji end up friends, perhaps lovers. Maybe enemies. Maybe she gets into a fight with a speeding bus. I don't know.

Random A/N: And you're right, Warp. Blueberries. Well, I _did_ say blue balls, so technically I still had it right. Ah…saving face, a time-honored MidnightCereal tradition. And thanks for the pub. Kinda thoughtless of me not to have mentioned it before.

Psycho Z: You know what? I think I _do_ like Maya. Go figure. Perhaps it's the way she says "THIS CAN'T BE!" It's so cute. Then this goes through my mind:

"Hi Maya, it's mom. Just want to let you know; um…Kenta had plugged in some things in your old room without a surge protector…and we were able to save your Preakness-Edition My Little Pony Stable Mates, but we had to trash everything else….we're still coming up for Christmas, see you then!"

"THIS CAN'T BE!"

* * *

"Sorry, we don't have any two percent milk left…we _do_ have skim."

"THIS CAN'T BE!"

* * *

"Ms. Ibuki, the reason you've been getting sick is because you're three weeks pregnant."

"THIS CAN'T BE! Wait…girl or boy?"

"Boy."

"THIS CAN'T BE!"

* * *

I'm tired.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	3. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 2

By MidnightCereal

"There's a place some ways from here and they have this really, really good green tea, but this is okay for now, I guess."

"Don't worry too much about putting yourself out for me," he said.

"Don't worry about…ha! Are you _kidding_ me? If I knew you were coming we coulda made plans, _I_ coulda made plans. Look at me, I'm a mess. I probably smell like sulfur..."

"You look fine," he said. She smelled fine, too. She sounded fine. When she had closed the distance between them and hugged him when they had first locked eyes today, she had felt fine, too. _Better than fine_, said something inside him. She had felt fine all over-

"But I could've at least washed up or something. But, but I _didn't_ and…and you're _here_ now and, and…you're _here_…"

"Yeah."

"Wow…you're here. I don't believe this. You just have to understand that." She had to stop talking as she tried to temper the ecstatic, contagious grin spreading over her pretty face. She wasn't trying very hard. "I didn't know if you…if it was okay now. I mean, you never ever tried until _now_."

"I'm sorry."

She exuded thorough confusion. "For _what_? Don't be sorry. Don't ever be sorry for this. You came now. You're here. That's all that matters."

"Okay." Shinji Ikari tried to look settled and attentive as he sat with and looked across the table at Mana Kirishima. They were nestled in the corner of an outdoor café one block from Keio University, pinned in by a brick façade perhaps a meter high and lined with bonsai.

He recalled her eyes being pools of deep grayish blue, but had forgotten just how beautiful they were. They momentarily flickered as she glanced over the wall at the narrow one-way street adjacent to them, and after her irises caught the glint off a passing sedan she turned them back to him. With a slow, careful breath she pushed her fingers through bangs and short locks of burnt umber. Just above the ambient idle din of conversation and table busing, there were her Converse Classics against the concrete, drumming for a silent, nervous band.

_She_ was nervous. She didn't have to be; he wasn't paying attention. God help him, this vibrant, stunning angel was going to twist herself into knots making a good first impression (again), and she was the furthest thing from his mind at the moment.

Mana had just asked him a question. He diverted just enough brain power to mail in the answer.

"No, I still play. I'm actually tutoring a girl on the side to make a little extra money."

It was enough to get her talking again. He'd be allowed to think again, about…

**Look at me. I'm right here.**

The Third Child discretely ran a slick finger over the crease of red parchment in his pocket. It was still there. It was as indisputably real as the faint scar high on Mana's forehead, the one that plunged into her dark red roots and was entirely hidden when her hand came away from her hair. It was as real as the possibility that the hand that wrote those words belonged to someone who had been very dead for five very long years.

He acknowledged it as her handwriting, her words. He acknowledged her insult…

He had _acknowledged_ her.

For half a decade Shinji had always been so careful. It was okay to look, and that was all that was okay. He never spoke to Asuka when she materialized, never tried touching her, never getting close enough to-

"And we're so close! And I'm not…spoken for. You too, I guess? _Aren't?_"

"I'm not seeing anyone. I mean, I was. But that was two years ago. And short. Just really short."

Mana let out a breath neither probably realized she had been holding. She relaxed and continued talking with her hands and mouth, wearing a warm smile. He tried basking in its lambency. He tried appreciating it for the work of art it was.

**Look at me. **

He failed.

What now? The Second Child had seemed to have always prattled on about what an idiot he was; or wounding memories of the year they had lived together, the year of the war; how much she hated him and how she never, ever, _ever_ wanted to see him again, _ever_, you fucking loser and I'm_never_ coming back; how much she missed him. Was the German girl going to start commenting on his aftershave? Was she going to criticize his semester midterm grades? Mock the pattern on his plaid boxers?

What if…what if she started touching him?

"I mean…you and Asuka…"

Speak of the devil.

"You and her. I just got the feeling that…I don't know…she was everything to you. Or she wanted to be everything." Mana laughed abruptly and just as quickly bit her lip. "I'd understand, I really would if you didn't want me, TO SEE ME…to see me…"

Before Shinji Ikari could stop himself he was already sealing his fate.

"So you've been living with Hikari long?"

"We were freshmen here last year, and ended up meeting at orientation." The young man nodded, exceedingly grateful she had grabbed the clue and changed the subject. "I'm glad I caught up with her again. I really wasn't sure if coming back to this area was a hot idea with…everything and all. Do you know what I mean?"

"I know." He of all people should know.

"And she needed someone. She'd never let you know, though. You'd have to torture it out of her."

Shinji began to truly relax as he felt himself finally being drawn into the conversation with Mana. "Torture _what_ out of her?"

"Well, I'd think you'd know. Maybe not, eh?"

"Eh?"

She was faux agitation and feigned exasperation. "_Shinji_…she misses Touji, get it? Her big sister's a broker in Nagano, her little sister's a_senior_, and she's not going to attend Keio. Stanford, if I remember. Hikari's lonely..."

"I didn't mean to get stupid. I think I understand. Really. It's-"

This was the exact moment Shinji messed way, _way_ up.

* * *

"_Roper (6) proceeded in the spirit of the Burke-Schumann approach, but allowed the characteristic velocity to vary with axial distance as modified by buoyancy and in accordance with continuity._"

Hikari blinked, unlocked her jaw and her teeth, took a deep, deep breath, and reread the passage for the seventeenth time.

"_Roper (6) proceeded in the spirit of the Burke-Schumann approach, but allowed the characteristic velocity to vary with axial dist-_"

"WHAT?" She incredulously asked her textbook. "WHAT?" she inquired of the window in her room with equal volume and incredulity. "_WHAT?_" she demanded from her ceiling.

_This is so…who can possibly decipher this…this…_

"Me no understand…"

The middle Horaki escaped her small room to trundle into the hallway and then the kitchen. She needed some water. To go with the aspirin.

General chemistry was a requirement for occupational therapy majors at Keio University, and since she had started taking the course earlier in the year, the modest brunette found herself wishing it wasn't. On the rare days their maddening schedules intersected, Hikari would just ask her flat mate for help. Unfortunately, if things went really well for her friend tonight, the only beneficiary of Mana's 'help' would be Shinji Ikari.

She refilled the water pitcher and groaned. _Why can't I understand this? Am I just the dumbest person in the world?_ "Mana, where are you when I need you?"

"On the couch. Lying down."

Hikari turned slowly as her roommate's somber inflection began to register. Uh-oh. "What…what are you doing back here?"

"I live here." Kirishima asserted this fact as if weighing a lung in the district morgue.

"But I thought…Mana, you and Shinji were so clo-"

"You know what he said?"

Hikari could only blink and look at the back of their couch. On the other side, she heard Mana sigh.

"You know what he said to me? I said something like, 'People get lonely after Third Impact,' and he told me," Mana stifled something, maybe a laugh, probably not, "he said, 'I understand. Really. It's like all the people I ever really cared about never came back.'" And then Mana jackknifed upright, peering over the furniture's ridge at the freckled young woman. She was smiling, oddly.

Something mothering welled up from within Hikari, but she articulated it with a fumbling stutter. "I-I'm sure he didn't mean-"

"_All of them_." The sitting student sucked on her lower lip and blinked furiously. "I think I stopped thinking, just…I just shut down. I hit him-"

"You _what_?"

"Not hard…not _real_ hard. But he felt it. He better had felt it. I think I overreacted, but I just wasn't ready to hear that." She nodded, still smiling like she knew a terrible, dirty secret. She sucked her lip again, and the corners of her mouth suddenly dipped.

"Mana…if I knew he didn't care anymore I wouldn't have bothered getting back to Kensuke. I wouldn't have set this up. You know that."

Hikari's flat mate mused for a silent second, rose and rounded a cushy armrest. "He cares. He thinks he can fake me out. He cares. I'll be ready next time. Sure bet."

"So…" Hikari paused and shrugged. Mana was closer. "What do you…can I do something?"

The girl with burnt umber hair jerked her shoulders again. Again and again and again. "Come _on_, Hikari. What do _you_ think?"

"…Come here," was all Horaki murmured. It was enough for Mana to take the last few steps into the offered embrace and break the rest of the way down. "Just take a breath. It's okay-"

"-_hurts_…not all of them…" Mana shook again.

"Take a breath. It's alright."

Her roommate, her best friend, happened to be the only person that could have helped her with an assignment that was due to morrow, and had been eating her alive for the last week. Mana Kirishima was in no state of mind to answer questions pertaining to global reaction rates of hydrocarbon molecules, and the person responsible was also the reason Hikari Horaki was able to take solace that she was, at the very least, _not_ the dumbest person in the world.

_Shinji…you stupid, stupid man…_

* * *

"Okay…stop playing. Just stop… _stop_."

"Don't you think it'd help if I added some more rosin to the bow?"

"No. No, I don't."

"How about raising my elbow?"

"No."

"Well, we won't find out if I don't try, will we?"

"I don't want you to try because I know it won't work, and I know it won't work because I've been doing this long enough to know. And I _do_ know. So please…don't try. Please."

"I see………………but maybe if I played for just a second."

"_No_…" But the student played anyway. The teacher listened and let his disciplined ears provide the answer, which was unsurprisingly and unequivocally _No, no, oh Jesus, no…_

"_Mihiro_…"

"_What?_ Now I_know_ it doesn't work because-"

"Because I said it wouldn't before you even started playing."

"No, it's because I_tried_ and now I know from personal experience…what was that face for?"

"It's for nothing, alright? Shift with your arm and keep your wrist straight."

"That's it? Why didn't you just say that right off the bat, then?"

"I _did_ say that right off the bat!"

"When?"

"Just a minute ago."

"No you didn't. I would've remembered that."

"I know what I said, Mihiro!"

"And I would've remembered if you really just said it. I'm like an elephant when it comes to remembering things. A _robot_ elephant that takes memory dumps. You probably thought you said it when you only really thought it. Don't get so bent out of shape about it, happens to the best of us."

And before he could open his mouth to tell her no, I know what I said and I'm not getting bent out of shape, she was playing again.

Somewhere, Yo-Yo Ma was having a sudden and unexpected stroke. Of this, Shinji Ikari was quite certain.

There was the money the nineteen year-old man received for these lessons –fifteen hundred yen per week- and…yeah, that was it, actually. He couldn't think of another reason he voluntarily put himself through this. Thirteen year-old Mihiro Kamakura had a way of generating especially virulent cultures of distemper, and…and maybe that was it. Because his agitation was very nearly tangible. To Shinji, her cello lessons became irrevocably linked with angry mental rashes, and there was guaranteed to be a at least a break out or two-

"Are you _plucking_ the _strings_?"

"No…"

"What did I say about plucking the strings?"

"Don't pluck the strings or you'll detune the cello?"

"What're you doing now?"

"Plucking the strings."

"Stop doing it! I…you're doing it _right now_! You're doing it as I'm speaking the words that are coming out of my mouth right now that are informing you to _stop plucking the strings_! Right _now_!"

"Okay."

"…You're _still_ doing it!"

"I forgot, okay? I'm sorry."

"But you just said you remembered…" Was she doing this on purpose? It was moments like this Shinji –cautiously- wondered what Asuka might do in a similar situation. As a result, nearly every Tuesday and Thursday from four-thirty to six o'clock for the past year, he was beholden to the stark image of the Kamakura's only child wearing her three-quarter cello like a splintered yoke. Misato always said he had the patience of a saint, but it was these tortur…tutoring sessions with the cute (but annoying) and well-meaning (but very annoying) teenager-initiate that consistently reminded him his former guardian was right. She was so very right.

"Mihiro…whatever. Just…whatever. Can we get back to playing?"

Her straight shoulder length black hair swayed slightly as she nodded. "Sure."

"Can you get back to listening to me?"

"I can do that."

"And then actually doing what I'm telling you to do?"

"This is a strong possibility."

"Let's concentrate."

"Gotcha."

The phone rang and she became a guided missile, homing in on the warbling appliance, nearly breaking her neck tripping over and effectively detuning her string instrument.

"Hello? SHINTA!"

Shinji often thought someone should pray for her boyfriend. Not him; preferably someone with much less experience with God.

The former pilot had long ago grown accustomed to the passage of time during the tutoring sessions at Mihiro's large house, nestled in a hilly well-to-do district of Tokyo-3. Sure enough, a quick glance at his flip phone vindicated his internal clock. He would be done here in a few…someone left him a message.

* * *

"Here you go. Have as much as you like. What's it called, again? I forgot already."

"It's shawarma. You don't have to share anymore."

"How could I forget something with that name? I want to share." Maya grinned and waved in the general direction of the shsv…sharva…tasty lamb thingy. "Eat, Shinji."

The young man in question nodded at the other person at the table. "Maybe Kensuke wants to try some more?"

"Kensuke's had enough," Ibuki quickly asserted with a tight smile.

Kensuke slowly withdrew his chopsticks from the shawarma.

"I didn't know you two were friends," said Shinji as Maya swatted Kensuke's hand, again hovering over her meal.

The woman wagged a finger. "But you were the one who suggested he try for a security position in the first place, remember? So all the blame falls on you."

_I was just joking. Don't apologize. Don't apologize. Don't apologize. Don't apolog_-

"Sorry."

Maya gave a mental sigh. He seemed so much of the child that had literally been dragged kicking and screaming into the family business half a decade ago. He was good at breathing and blinking and not trying to hurt anything, living to live because no one told him to die.

He was good at acting like Misato and Asuka and Rei never happened. There wasn't any growth in him. She had glimpsed a new, better man that had been blossoming into that empty shell even as the old world crumbled around him in eroding clumps. Somewhere in between the end of that world and their impromptu dinner at Mimi's Café today, that new man had been dealt with. She fought the frown begging to contort her small, tight mouth.

Kensuke softly patted Shinji's shoulder. "Take my word for it. The only reason you'd have to apologize to me is if I was working directly under her-OW!"

"Stop. _Eating_."

Kensuke massaged his sore hand as Shinji leaned forward and gently propped his elbows on the table top. He looked at her. "Have I thanked you yet for inviting me?"

She tried waving him off.

"I wasn't really in the mood to cook after those cello lessons…" He flashed a glance at a corner in the restaurant, brows momentarily knitting.

"Shinji…is she…Mihiro's getting on your nerves? Cute little Mihiro?" The woman knew she sounded unreasonably amused, truly not caring.

"I know learning a new instrument can be really hard, but…" He just shook his head, "but goddamn…"

Now _that_ made Maya laugh. The thought of someone, anyone getting to Shinji enough for him to curse them was uplifting in a way only someone who made a living at Nerv could understand. Maya understood perfectly, and was just grateful that something had made her smile in a way she hadn't in a long, long…

"What's that on your cheek?" the bifocaled man asked, abruptly truncating Maya's tree of warm n' fuzzies "Right under your eye?"

Shinji was suddenly still before he wiped at a series of thin, long abrasions running parallel to each other on his cheek bone. "Oh…accident."

"What kind of accident?" Kensuke pursued, something akin to cynical disbelief solidifying in his voice. That in itself was unsettling to the scientist, not only because the young Aida took pains to maintain an affable, benign attitude, but also because as a member of Nerv Security he had been trained to smell a lie a mile away.

Disbelief transmuted into good ol' fashioned horror. "Oh _no_…she hit you, didn't she?"

Maya sat up. "_Who_ hit you?"

Shinji shrugged. "She had the right to. I…I said something stupid, that's all."

"_Who_ had a right to?"

Kensuke groaned. "Oh_man_. You pissed _Mana_ off? Wow. That is _pure_ skill, the way Hikari said she kept talking you up."

Mana? Why did that name sound so familiar to her? "What did you say that could justify…I know you at least _that_ well." _Don't I?_

"Just something stupid, okay? Don't worry about it. It's been a week. It's over now."

Kensuke's new face was naked concern, which further unsettled Maya. He knew better than anyone what Shinji's real malfunction was, and if he had reason to be worried…

Maya squirmed.

"Well…" the sandy-haired man started, "I guess that explains why she didn't meet up with us here. If I knew you two had a falling out I wouldn't have invited-"

"_Mana_._Kirishima_." Only after the name rolled off Maya's Teflon tongue was she able to close her mouth. She stared past the boys, at the person that had just walked through the door, who, incidentally, the name belonged to. She had been kept abreast of the Trident incident on only the most rudimentary level. It was Mana she remembered, just hanging all over the fourteen-year old Third Child like a heavy coat on a wire hanger. She vividly recalled thinking if the cherubic girl ever lived to see adulthood she would be a stunningly, heart-achingly, impossibly beautiful woman.

And Mana Kirishima was very much alive. But shock steadily gave way to simmering anger as Shinji's spine further calcified with each of Mana's footfalls.

"The train was really late," the younger woman blurted out as soon as she entered conversational range. "Late, like thirty minutes. In this country, what're the odds of that? Really?"

"Why didn't you call?" Kensuke wondered aloud. "We would've waited."

Mana and Maya snorted for entirely different reasons.

"Call? Well, not with my service. It's pathetic." Mana was touching Shinji now, a feather's touch drifting along his shoulder. She was staring at the side of his head. "Aren't you surprised?"

Shinji nodded stupidly while smiling tightly, choosing rather to sip his carbonated beverage than open his mouth…

And give her another reason to put her hands on him…

"Why bother coming at all, then?" Maya heard herself ask as she tried placing the strain of agitation coursing through her.

The Kirishima girl finally looked at her questioner, her own annoyance momentarily pan-flashing. "Because I like surprises, getting and giving. You're Maya, aren't you? Shinji kept saying how nice you were."

"Right. But people can be pretty selective about what they think is a good or bad surprise, just like people can be selective about whom they're nice to."

The woman with grey blue eyes gave a small laugh as Kensuke and Shinji adjusted to the precipitous drop in room temperature. Then she smiled at Ibuki. "Yeah. What am I going to do about who's mean to me, besides nothing? And if Shinji doesn't like my surprises he can just say so."

"I'm sorry, Mana. I gave the impression I was just talking about Shinji. I wasn't."

"And I'm sorry, too," Mana communicated, placing the flat of her free palm over her heart in a show of empathy that almost seemed sincere. "I gave the impression that I cared you weren't just talking about Shinji. I don't."

Shinji coughed. Kensuke held out Maya's plate. "You wanna try some shawarma?"

"For someone so fixated on him you have an odd way of showing you care."

Should the older woman have felt guilty her latest barb eroded the last of Mana's cheer? Because she didn't, and even smirked as Mana snapped back. "This may come as a bit of a shock, but I didn't come all the way here to fight _you_."

"Of course not. Not when you're already fighting Shinji."

The indignation reflected in the younger woman's eyes, and etched in her brow and tight mouth withered instantly with that, and Mana looked to the floor. The Third Child emulated her as Maya took it upon herself to speak on his behalf.

"What could he have said to you? Shinji would cut his own arm off before hurting anyone else. So you understand where I'm coming from when I say I _have_ to hear this. This is going to be good. I can feel it."

Something scraped against the floor offensively as Shinji abruptly pushed away from the table and rose. "Thanks for dinner, okay? It was nice. Real nice. I have work to do back on the campus-"

Maya Ibuki was having none of this. "Don't cover for her, please? It's not your job to excuse her-"

As he stood next to Mana he seethed and failed at hiding it. "_God_, Maya. It was just…a _scratch_."

"Not to me."

"Why do you even care? Just please _drop it_."

"I'm not letting anyone hurt you, Ta-chan."

"He…he said I kinda smelled. I'd been working with chemicals all day, and I didn't have any sleep and I had bombed this test. I was stressed and I took it out on him. I didn't mean…"

As Kensuke crunched on a piece of ice, Shinji looked momentarily confused. Maya…

"THAT'S _IT_?" An idle worker lounging in the corner of empty Mimi's Café sat up at the oldest customer's outburst. "YOU PUNCHED HIM BECAUSE YOU _STINK_? THAT'S IT?"

At first, the son of Gendo just stared. "What is your _problem_?"

"You're the one with the problem. I'm just helping you get rid of it."

"But I didn't ask…Mana!" Shinji called after the woman who had wordlessly spun and stalked towards the exit. He hesitated before pursuing her, just for a moment, and not long enough for Maya's liking.

"You should let her go."

"I have to set things right."

"That shouldn't be up to you!" But Shinji was already gone, his and Mana's translucent reflections becoming slight as the glass door shut with a low hiss.

"But it's up to you to make things right?"

She glowered at Kensuke when she realized his rhetorical question was addressed to her. "We need to talk."

* * *

"Mana, _wait_. Mana…"

Shinji suppressed a groan. It seemed that for all the world Maya Ibuki –the second-nicest woman he had ever met- had instigated and engaged Mana Kirishima –_the_ nicest woman he had ever met- in an increasingly heated and personal argument. All he could think was,_What an odd way of competing for the title of 'Nicest Woman Shinji Ikari Has Ever Met'._

"Mana, just slow down, okay? Please?"

Well, he could think that, and also wonder if it was possible to quantify exactly how upset Mana currently was, which, judging from the speed and length of her stride, was very _very_. Just how unfair could things get for her?

"So are you ready to get some work in?" She couldn't have just said that; the voice was no where as bitter as it should have been. "Where's your campus, anyway?"

"I…it's another ten minutes. Maya's not usually…she's _never_ like that. She's been acting weird the past couple of weeks and I don't know why. That shouldn't have happened to you."

"Huh? Don't sweat it. You weren't the one acting crazy." She suddenly stopped and stood on the empty sidewalk. Only a second passed before her follower pulled up at her shoulders; he noted they were suddenly tension-free.

"I shouldn't be complaining, but you don't seem upset. At all. Shouldn't you be mad?"

Casually, Mana turned to him, giving Shinji just enough time to get scared before she beamed, slightly altering her walking path so that their shoulders touched.

"I'll act upset if you really want me to. The problem was she tried too hard. It has to be like you don't even care." He hadn't noticed her wrapping up his right arm until she glanced back, lightly tugging him in the process. "Besides, it worked. You came out after me, now I have you all to myself."

He wondered now just how long it would be this time, before she would be the one tiring of his listless ambiguity, before she came to contemptuously sneer at him, before she came to despise him for being unable to care that he could not despise her back.

But for now, _now_…

…he _enjoyed_ it. An old feeling made new.

"How'd you know I'd leave them to catch up?"

Her voice became galvanized by some limitless insurance. "Come _on_. Maya's not the only one that knows you 'that well'. Think about it, Shinji. My side's nicer, younger, softer…"

Mana Kirishima _was_ very, very soft.

"You have a bigger sun hat," he chimed in, finally smiling as a flash of mirth sparked a fond memory.

The dark-haired woman shoved him, laughing as she did so. "Shut up! Wait, you're talking about that big white hat I had that went with my sundress?"

"Oh _yeah_-"

Impossibly, her smile brightened. "SHUT UP! My grandmother gave me that hat! I _named_ that hat!"

"You didn't have to lie for me in there," Shinji said.

"If I didn't, then why didn't you stop me?" Mana Kirishima again clasped his thin tricep as he answered with silence. "If everyone you care about is supposed to be gone, I don't think Kensuke and Maya got the memo. I don't think they're the only ones that didn't…do you?" Her words hung close to him.

"I wasn't thinking."

"Me neither. We're even. Just try not to ever say something like that again." Mana's laughter was soft and melodious. "Ever."

"Ha ha. Okay, I know not to-_ow_!"

Mana's laughter was soft and melodious. "_Ever_." Her grip began cutting circulation to his forearm.

"Okay! _Ow!__Okay!_"

She called off her boa constrictor and relaxed again. "So…is Maya, like, in love with you or something?"

No way. "No way, not with all the stuff we've been through. If you had to know me like she had to you wouldn't want anything to do with me, either."

Mana could only sigh. "You are _so_…fatal."

"You have no idea."

Shinji could see in her profile the internal skirmish determining whether she'd pursue the meaning of his last words with her next. Thankfully, she did not. "Who's Ta-chan?"

End of Chapter 2

A/N: N/A

Random A/N: I want this story to have a soundtrack. One song for each chapter.

IT'S COLLEGE BASKETBALL SEASON! HARDWOOD SLUTS GO NUTS!

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	4. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 3

By MidnightCereal

Shinji stood at his workbench in the architecture building and looked down to see what kept slapping his calf; it was just Mana's foot, dangling as she peered at the plans on his inclined desk. She caught his calm, curious glance, correctly interpreting it.

"My ankle's a little sore, that's all," she quietly informed him, maintaining her soft but penetrating gaze. He wilted under its conviction when he tried meeting it.

"I could get a stool for you. I don't know why you'd want to see my work, anyway."

"I didn't come here just to see your work. You know that." She paused a beat, smiled and impossibly, her shoulder and arm and chest pressed further into him.

He gave an ineffectual 'hm', certain he gave no indication he steeled himself to keep from shivering. Whether they were fourteen of nineteen, junior high or college students, she was moving on him, continually. He might've well been standing still. Shinji may not have known what to do, but God, Mana did. She always did. She seemed to have been trained for this. There was more than a good chance that she was.

"So what're you drawing up here?" she asked, pointing at an elaborate and ornate architectural schematic…bailing him out.

"This," he quickly scanned it under the cone of light that scraped at the near darkness, "is for a project where we had to design something that used elements of gothic architecture. You know, like Notre-Dame Cathedral?"

"No, not really," she admitted, looking a little embarrassed.

"Well, take these, for example. They look a little like legs? Those are flying buttresses, they help support the…what?"

"Nothing…" Her straight-laced smile lasted for another split second before she snickered again.

"_What?_"

"Could…could you possibly say that again?" she asked sweetly, turning to him and batting her eyelashes.

"Say what again? Flying buttresses?"

She laughed again, the sweet sound carrying beyond the cozy cluster of lonely fringe workspaces and into the dim open center of the building, bouncing off the vaulted glass ceiling, down to the cloister below. "But you have to do it with that super-serious look on your face!"

"But that's just what it's called!"

"And that's why it's funny," Mana pointed out.

"Just how old are you, anyway…" he muttered, not quietly enough, seeing as she then kicked him in the shin.

"Old enough to know a funny word when I hear one. Jerk…" She pouted while he rubbed his leg, but soon looked pleasant again. No…not pleasant…

"Can I see this?" The young woman waited all of zero-point-zero seconds for his answer before reaching over to roll his precious blueprint into a tight scroll. With half of his class grade in her palm, Mana slid her foot back and away. Then the other.

"Um…what're you doing with that?"

She shrugged, impishness bubbling up again as she continued to back out of his clean workspace. "I don't know yet."

The young man couldn't tell exactly when impishness crossed the bridge over to mischief, but he knew -from months of Pavlovic conditioning by Asuka and Misato- that the distance between him and Mana was directly proportional to the degree he was about to get clowned.

She began wagging his project behind her like a rice paper tail. "This building's pretty big. A little creepy though, this empty. They just let you in here to work late?"

"It gets so noisy during the day. I did all the work on that…" he pointed to the tube of paper she tried twirling like a baton, "at night."

"Hm." Mana stepped onto the walkway that ringed the third floor, peering over the railing to whistle down at the atrium, which was touched by swaths of dull auxiliary nightlights. She was still retreating.

"What're doing with it?"

"I told you already, I don't know yet. You're afraid I'm gonna trash it?"

"No. So you don't need to back away."

"Then you don't need to chase me."

"I'm not chasing you." He stepped forward. She stepped back. "Didn't you say your ankle hurt?"

"Oh…" She wiggled her foot. "Yeah, it comes and goes. It's gone now and, um…so am I."

And before Shinji decided between playing at her little game and standing in place, she was halfway down the hall, her pleated skirt bouncing as she gleefully loped away from him.

_Guess that ankle's okay_, he thought, the door to a far corner stairwell opening with a loud, echoing click as she pushed through.

What _time_ was it? If this went anything like the requisite teasing sessions proctored by his former roommates, he could be here for _hours_. Hours searching for his assignment, hours spent trying not to curse Mana into oblivion for being unable to just leave him the hell alone.

Why couldn't he ever meet a normal female human being? Why was he either the object of their ridicule or their to-the-marrow scorn? Half of the women that existed had disappeared from the face of the Earth at the end of two-thousand and fifteen, and for all the world it seemed as if only the craziest ones had remained. He wondered, more than he cared to admit, whether Mihiro Kamakura's inability to follow his explicit and oft-repeated instructions resulted either from being raised in a household with non-existent parental supervision, or simply the worst case of ADD never diagnosed.

Yukie had been hurt before they had met, so her harassing phone calls and emails could nearly be excused.

But not that thing with the vegetable oil.

"_Hope you like french fries, Shinji, because you're going to smell like them for a week."_

And he had.

Even good ol' vanilla bean Maya Ibuki got in on the act today, sniping at his would-be girlfriend with appallingly practiced ease. Here he was tonight, and though Mana would probably hand his project back over when she tired of pulling his strings, the simple fact was he did not like to be teased. No…he hated it, actually. He simply had forgotten. Mana was here, and he was starting to remember all sorts of things…

"What're you still doing down there?"

He searched for the source of Mana's echoing voice a level below.

"_Down_ there, Shinji. What're you doing _down_ there."

She was leaning comfortably over the railing of an atrium walkway a floor above him. The light was dim as he stared, but even if it had been so weak as to hide her grin, he would have heard it in her laughing voice, anyway. "I'm flattered, but I don't see how you'll get your project back just gawking at me like that."

"What did you do with it?"

Her shrug was devoid of any trace of culpability…or sympathy. "It's around. I put it someplace."

"_Where?_"

She errantly picked at something beneath a fingernail. "Come _on_, if I was just going to tell you, why bother hiding it in the first place? Where's the fun in that?"

The Shinji in Shinji's mind was screaming his brains out. "Fine. You win, okay?" He sculpted a mask of stone over his naturally warm visage. "Flying…buttresses."

"Nice try. But I can't really see your face all that well from up here."

"But I can see _you_ just fine!" he yelled, wondering what it was that compelled young, beautiful women to jerk him around like the last car on a wooden roller coaster…and also if he could cut it off.

"Newsflash, Mr. Twenty-Twenty!" she huffed, "Myopia runs in my family. I'm getting fitted for contacts next Tuesday, so if you want your precious little blueprint you're just going to have to catch my flying buttress!"

"Are you _still_ mad about that thing I said last week? I thought we were even!"

"No, I'm not mad. All you have to do is catch me. I won't even move for twenty seconds. Will that even things out enough?"

"NO."

"One…"

"I'm not chasing you around this stupid building all night!"

He broke down when she got to two.

* * *

Kensuke sat in a public park on a cool sloping knoll, which gradually dove into a lamp-lit trail running along it its base like a black stream. The grassy land again dipped past the asphalt path, and somewhere far below the lush greenery likely diffused into the infinite array of urban utilities and modern conveniences perforating Tokyo-3 proper. Over the glowing machine city a night sky tapestry yielded a black canvas warmed with a crimson backlight; one needed only to look at the half moon floating over Asia to know why that was.

On a completely unrelated note, Maya was still yelling things at him.

"-ssibly pick _her_, out of all the people in the world? What were you _thinking_?"

"I was thinking she's beautiful, she's nice, she's close, she's gonna get Shinji laid-"

"What she is going to get him is _hurt_, or worse. She's a _spy_. She is a _known_, documented _spy_."

"Exactly, and that's the most harmless kind. And she's one who worked for a rival government Angel defense agency that hasn't existed for at least five years."

"I don't see why that means I have to trust her."

Kensuke finally began to feel irritated. "What you meant to say was you don't see why that means _Shinji_ has to trust her. So why does all this have to be about you?"

"It's about me looking out for someone who's in some type of trouble. You understand me, Aida? If you had seen the way he looked at me when I caught him two weeks ago, it's…" Her voice became momentarily strained. "It's like he wasn't even there!"

The rookie Nerv security officer wanted badly to retort in some poignant, concise manner; agreeing with the person against whom you are debating typically makes it difficult to get a word in edgewise. So Kensuke listened and waited.

"It's like Shinji wants to leave…is _that_ it?"

"No." The young man couldn't tell if he had just lied.

"Good. Because he had his chance to go with everyone else."

"I think Mana'll do a good job keeping him here."

She had been standing, and kicked her sneaker-clad heel into a clump of damp sod. "I just don't trust her."

"Why is this about _you_?"

"Why do _you_ think he should trust someone who'd committed to lying to him once already?"

"Because she's just this normal girl who got caught up in this crap and just wants some peace!"

Maya snapped to him with an absurdly severe expression. "Not at Shinji's expense!"

He could actually feel his mouth, brow and eyes carving disbelief into his face. Where was all this anger coming from? "Are you just going to act like he doesn't have any say in this? If I understand right, we're talking about the only person in the world to ever have _complete_ free will. Yeah, I dragged him to a waterhole. I can't make him drink, and you can't keep him from drinking, either."

"_We_…" Maya rapidly flicked her wrist between her and Kensuke, shaking her head, "are not talking about _God_. Shinji Ikari attracts born liars like-"

Now.

"Mana wasn't _born_ a liar. She _was_ born September thirteenth, two-thousand and one in Ibaraki Prefecture. Her father was killed three days later at the Battle of Tokyo Bay. He was a high school teacher. His wife was a cardiologist. She committed suicide two years later, so Mana's paternal grandmother took her in. She was a cardiologist, too. Lucky, because she was able to diagnose the cause of Mana's heart palpitations and prescribe atenolol. The reports didn't say anything about her parents being liars, either. They're _dead_, but not liars."

"Alright. Fine, she-"

"When Mana was three, her favorite stuffed toy was a little cloth monkey with black button eyes. She found it one day in the washroom, already half-eaten by a huge Norwegian Rat. Even now she has an irrational fear of large rodents. Anything bigger than a mouse. A computer mouse. She was seven when she suffered a compound fracture in her left arm after an accident on the school jungle gym. It healed funny and now she's double-jointed, but it didn't make her anymore of a liar."

"Kensuke…" Maya sighed.

"She was bullied constantly in fifth grade by a Mitsuko Souma, until Valentine's Day, when she found the girl eating the chocolates she gave her very first crush. Mitsuko spent the rest of the day in the school infirmary. The only one that was lying was the boy, and when Mana found out he had _given_ Mitsuko the chocolates, he spent the rest of the day in the school infirmary.

"Mana stopped taking her heart medication at twelve and she went out for track at Izubuchi Junior High a year later. Without cheating, she set Ibaraki Prefecture records in the four-hundred meters, four-hundred and forty meter hurdles, and the triple jump, even beating out Hitomi Kanzaki in one out of three head-to-head races at the Saitama Relays."

"You…Hitomi '_The Vision_' Kanzaki? Olympic silver medallist?"

"The last gift Mana's grandmother gave her before she died from breast cancer was a white sundress, and a hat with a big-ass brim. Mana named the hat Eclipse-chan. Her new child services-appointed guardian was Hirotoshi Sana, just a cover, a _lie_ to mask her induction into the Trident Angel Defense Program, run by the R and D wing of the JSDF. Her name disappeared off the enrollment list at Izubuchi Junior High two weeks after custody was finalized. Six months after the initial Trident activation experiments, Mana was enrolled at Tokyo-3 Junior High to spy on Shinji. It was the first formal education she had received since her grandmother's death.

"From the time Trident Unit-02 was incinerated by a called-in N-2 air strike until five months after Third Impact, Mana did not exist. The reports say she may have returned from a LCL body identified west of Busan in South Korea, but information from that time is so scant we'll probably never know for sure. Hirotoshi Sana never returned, and the government officially disavowed any knowledge of Project Trident. At fifteen she was allowed to enroll at Ledford International Academy in Tokyo-2. Wouldn't you know it, she was accepted into one of the premiere multinational institutions in Kanto, and she didn't even have to lie to get in."

"I get it, Kensuke. Stop."

"That year she was nearly killed when a school bus driver in an oncoming lane sideswiped her boyfriend's coupe."

"Okay."

"Mana needed sixty-three stitches in her head and three screws in her foot to stabilize her ankle."

"STOP."

"She weighs forty-nine kilograms, her blood type is AB, she's one-point seventy-eight meters tall, she's a C-cup…and they're _spectacular_."

Maya screwed her eyes into her head, and then held her hands up to ward off something unpleasant. "Kensuke-"

"After Senior Prom she lost her virginity to So Naka-"

"_STOP!_" she finally yelled. "_Stop_. Don't-"

"Don't what? Don't humanize her? But why _not_?"

Doctor Ibuki only shook her head.

"You didn't think I checked on her? You thought, what, I just fed one of my best friends ever to the nicest shark I could find? I work for Nerv Security. Why wouldn't we know everything in the _world_ about Mana Kirishima?"

Maya hesitated and visibly worked at pushing her halting words from her mouth. "I wasn't…"

He almost snorted. "You _were_." He couldn't help himself. The woman had gone an insanely long way to demonize Mana, paint Shinji as an emotionally fragile dependant, and then portray _him_ as a negligent incompetent inconvenienced by her request to look out for the Third Child. She had practically begged him to set Shinji up on a date.

And could the fact that she was hiding something have been anymore obvious? That was the most insulting thing. Kensuke had been personally trained by the head of Nerv Security and formally of Section-2, Warren Choi.

He could smell a lie a mile away.

"Now you know. Mana is not a born liar. If she were dangerous, we'd know. _I_ would know. So don't you think it's about time you tell me why you hate the idea of…"

Oh no.

She peered down at him, eyebrow arched when he clutched his head and groaned. "What?"

"Why didn't you _tell_ me, Maya? I took for granted you cared about him, but I didn't know you-"

Her eyes lit up. "Oh no! No no no no no no. It's not like that, honest!"

"Really?" He looked at her. She wasn't lying. Thank all manner of Kami she wasn't lying.

Maya made a small sound in the back of her throat. Her gaze was solemn, and it rose from him to the black heavens, to the moon, to its own satellites, approximately one and a half billion luminescent spores hanging in a weightless red cloud. "It'd be like dating my brother."

* * *

Mana stood with her hands on her hips in a runway-lit lecture hall aisle as she tried, successfully, to look complacent. Shinji stood in the adjacent aisle, trying not to vomit shawarma.

Oh, sweet, sweet oxygen. "Don't you…why don't you…why are you so _fast_?"

Mana flicked a wrist at him, smiling bashfully. "Oh, you're just saying that because you've been chasing me for the last half hour. I don't know why you look so surprised. If your training was like mine you guys had to be like fighter pilots."

If by 'like fighter pilots', Mana meant having smore-eating contests with Misato, Asuka and Pen-Pen every Friday night they weren't sitting in a vat of liquid while trying to link with giant human beings, then she was right. Their training regimens couldn't have been anymore similar!

"Did I tell you I could once bench press ninety kilograms?" she asked him with sickening enthusiasm.

"Really? Because I couldn't tell by the way you had dragged me up that flight of stairs…"

"It wasn't a _big_ flight of stairs," Mana echoed to him, and then across the line of empty ledgers she started doing jumping jacks. He felt drained (and a little horny) just looking at her, and he couldn't help but grumble to himself. "_Hey_, I don't even want to hear it. If you weren't enjoying this you wouldn't be smiling like that."

He was smiling?

"Maybe," he began, a fifth wind coming to him, "maybe I _am_ enjoying this. Misato said once I had a masochistic streak."

"Really now?"

He nodded and peered at her. "Then again, Misato said lots of things. Especially when she was blasted." The image of a giant rabbit named Frank popped into his head.

Mana's eyes widened as the final piece of an old puzzle fell into place. "So _that's_ what that smell was coming off her…"

"Nope, you're thinking of turpentine. Long story."

She blinked. "I bet."

They lapsed into a mutually agreed silence…

…and on an equally silent cue he sprinted across they aisle. He was only halfway across before she had dashed all the way up the ramp and through the lecture hall exit.

"Get back here!" he demanded of Mana's shapely calf just as it vanished into another stairwell on the opposite side of the second floor.

Got her _now_. There wasn't any exit above the second floor for that stairwell, and the exit below them would trip a fire alarm if she pushed it. All he had to do was stand at the landing for this level and she'd be trapped, he'd have his project back, and he could finally go home to replenish his electrolytes.

Half a minute passed before he stood at the stairs leading to the first and third floors, massaging his legs to ward off a charlie horse, which he knew from pick-up basketball games with Touji was the gunshot wound of muscle cramps. Just a second longer, then she'd bound up or down these steps and the game would be over. And he would stop smiling…

She had been right. Mana had been having sport of the Third Child for the better part of the ten o' clock hour, and what had he done? He smiled, grinned a big, goofy, sweaty grin, like he had won some sick lottery.

And he would do it all again in an irregular heartbeat.

This was Mana Kirishima. This was a woman he had come to save in another distant, dark lifetime. This had been the girl he had shared his first real kiss with, a thing born not from a desire to humiliate or dominate him, not something rushed and hard and self-serving, not something which required oxygen deprivation. Not something from someone who tirelessly sought to ridicule everything about him that was light and warm, even when she had no reason to, even when all he wanted was to help her help him help her.

Even when she was dead.

He could smile tonight, because Mana Kirishima was different.

Mana Kirishima was coming up the stairs. He bounced down to meet her, energized.

"You think I wouldn't know this building like the back of my hand?" he asked her, squinting in the darkness and just making out her auburn tresses.

Wait.

His eyes adjusted more, and met her pair. No, not a pair, just one, narrowed shining sapphire. Something in him broke, and as if to show her he lost his balance. His leg folded back as his tailbone clipped the tread of a concrete step, and he painfully skidded the rest of the way down. Shinji came to rest at the same place he had been for most of that brutal, terrible year, and that was beneath Asuka Langley Sohryu.

That blue, living, violent sea was nothing but a contemptuous slit now, but he was still adrift in it, becoming lost as thoughts of school projects, leg cramps, and Mana floated away aimlessly.

"Do you know what I think? When I see you laying there?" The question barely carried to him, but Shinji jumped as if there was an explosion of sound. He couldn't begin to imagine what she was thinking, and was too cold, too numb to guess. She had caught him. He had lowered his guard, and she had been right there to drive something jagged into him.

"I'm thinking," and here she flicked at a dirty strand with the arm that wasn't hanging from her shoulder in bloody, sinewy ribbons, "why I bother to come, anymore. I wonder…how you're able to do this to me. I mean, it's been forever, you know? I'm trying to convince myself I don't care, like I used to. It was so easy back then. But when you have _nothing_, things like caring, things like _you_, they get magnified. And I can't stand it. It feels like dying, it really does."

This was going to end like the bad times. _This_ was a bad time. Armor eluded him, and he searched for it, searched again and failed again and again. Things were going to get _bad_, he would be _crushed_ into nothing because he had no armor to shield him from the space where her eye should have been but only a hollowed bloodied hole remained.

The dead thing dipped its head like a girl would, when she was insecure and heartbroken, when she was alive.

"Why won't you talk me?" it whispered, Asuka whispered. Her cracked lips trembled. "Do you hate me? Do you hate me for what I did to you? I'm _sorry_. That's what you want, Shinji? An apology? I'M SORRY."

_I don't hate you. I just didn't understand you._ But it should have been too late for apologies, for understanding. Reconciliation was a thing of his past, not his present. It shouldn't be here to sully him now and to splinter and fester and infect newer, cleaner memories. He shouldn't be hearing this. He shouldn't be seeing this. He shouldn't-

"Just look at me. Just talk to me. Get up and touch me. I'm right here. You asshole, I'm _right here_. Get up and touch me."

He almost did. An unnamed will kept him down and he closed his eyes, cupped his ears, not knowing whether to swallow the sick scream in his hitching throat or unleash it.

"**GET UP AND LOOK AT ME!**"

He got up and ran. He wouldn't be able to recall how he had done it, but Asuka was two flights below him when he had finally opened his eyes again. Up another flight, another, just to get away from the voice, echoing inside him as though he were hollow. It filled him and he rose higher and higher to escape her scream, her angry unshed tears, the socket filled with nothing that tried swallowing him so he became nothing, too.

A serrated thing bit into and immolated his calf. Shinji fell as the exhaustion crashed into him. He clutched his leg as muscles clinched and unclenched, then clenched again of their own volition.

"Let me see. Hold still."

At first, he thought Asuka had risen from the second floor to snatch him and drag him back to wherever it was she came from. But he imagined her hand having the warmth of a dead fish. Mana would have warmer hands. Mana would have _two_ hands…

"It's just a cramp. Come on…" As her arms slipped beneath him, Shinji steadied himself on his good leg. He kept his head down to keep her from guessing what the hell made his face look like…like _that_. "Okay, okay. I've had my fun. Let's get your project and get out of here. I'm pretty good at making these cramps go away. You'll feel like dancing when we get you home-"

"You don't have to do that. I'll make it back just fine."

Mana hesitated, and as Shinji leaned against her for support he swore he could feel her heart sink.

"You're kidding, right? You can barely walk." She chuckled weakly.

"It'll be good in a few more minutes, and I don't live too far from here. I'll even walk you to the train station, okay?" And then he looked up and into her eyes, regretting the decision immediately. He should tell her, let her know this wasn't her fault, so she could stop looking at him as if he had personally just ended her world. Again. "I'm just tired and I have some more work to-"

"I understand," Mana lied. She flinched suddenly as if someone had sucker-punched her.

* * *

"You're still mad I sucker-punched you, aren't you?"

"That's not it, Mana." They were close to the elevated platform inside the train station. Great. More stairs. "I'm not mad."

"I'm sorry about your project, taking it and teasing you like that. I didn't think you'd cramp up."

"I know."

She winced for the fourth time.

"I thought you liked it."

"I did."

"Look at me."

**LOOK AT ME! **

"Shinji…what's wrong?"

"I have dry eyes," he managed with disturbing ease. They were on the platform now, which was barren save for them and an empty Tokaido line train waiting to whisk its sparse cargo to Keio University and points beyond. Overhead median lights held the darkness at a diffuse brim as Mana turned suddenly to tightly hug him. He wanted to return it, but something blue and accusing was out there, waiting for him to do so. He wanted to cry. It was waiting for him to do that, too.

"I had a really good time tonight."

He mentally kicked himself as soon as the chuckle escaped him. "But we didn't really do anything."

She pulled back just enough to look up and smile at him. "And I _still_ had a good time. What does that tell you?"

He shrugged. "That…you're really, really tired?"

The bell sounded and she released him, her smile morphing until it stood for something bittersweet. It was time for her to go, but she stood and stared and tapped her lips with equally soft fingertips. He could only stand and allow her to study him. He owed her that, at least. The woman puzzled over him for what seemed like a minute; sixty seconds studying his own smiling mouth and his eyes, trying to dissect those things to discover what was making them lie.

He should tell her, but sixty seconds wasn't enough time to convince himself that he could.

She moved, wordlessly taking those fingers and pressing them to his own lips, and then pivoting to board the departing train. Shinji Ikari still felt the warmth of her fingerprint, and he almost told her. But the doors were closing now. The train was moving now. She was looking at him now, still wearing that studious, bittersweet simper. Electricity arced across the third rail as the train slid into a black tunnel, taking her away from him, now.

He was alone now.

And yet, he was not.

End of Chapter 3

A/N: From what I understand, Mana Kirishima was practically designed to be the old Shinji's soul mate in the original game. "She's like a Mary-Sue, for goodness sake!" mikomi exclaims on his/her Girlfriend of Steel information site (Thanks, by the way). So what happens when much of what made them the perfect couple is outdated because of the changes Shinji has undergone since then? So I feel justified in jerking Mana around a little bit.

So what happens now? Well, _I_ know. The problem is I have yet to write it. I'll be back on this literary horse when I've completed the next three chapters. In between that time I might have something else out. No really, I've written the first page of the Battle Royale / ITDR crossover, and there's already a dead body in a warehouse! Isn't that unbelievably pleasant?

Random A/N: Thanks be to my reviewers, and whoever invented cheesecake, because I just can't get enough of that sweet creamy stuff. Yeah, that's right, I rhymed something that involved cheesecake. Recognize.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	5. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 4

By MidnightCereal

It was only when the muffled hiss of the hotel shower abruptly ceased that Souichi Nakajima bothered opening his eyes again. There was nothing impossibly intriguing etched in the black shadows of the indigo ceiling, but he stared anyway as he lay prostrate, his long legs dangling over the foot of the bed.

No. Not very interesting at all, as compelling as the room was large as it was luxurious as its walls were thick; a low moan periodically rose from behind the last thing, each successive cry more guttural, more desperate than the last. Lost in the perpetual darkness of the space or his own thoughts, So ignored those sounds, and also the breezy soprano hum emanating from the bathroom.

For all practical purposes, So Nakajima was nothing more than another piece of furniture, and other than the slow rise and fall of his shallow chest, the seventeen year-old was no more animate than the television or the floor lamp, the cherry wood desk populated by continental breakfast menus and coffee filters, or the corner armchair strewn with underclothes.

This was all true until the humming stopped and So smiled, a gradual, practiced creasing that fit his face in the manner a sock gradually conformed to a foot. Only a second passed before the expression appropriately mapped the flesh contour, and afterwards he belonged to humanity once more. Just enough.

There was a click as the bathroom knob turned and artificial light tore a gash across the Berber carpet. Mana stepped out, wearing mild confusion on her face, a t-shirt that came to her mid thigh, and that was it.

"Why didn't you turn the lights back on?" she asked as her eyes swept across the small dark suite.

"There was nothing here worth me doing so." He shrugged mechanically. "You were taking a shower, after all."

The sound that crawled out of the back of Mana's throat was completely at odds with the innocent kindergartener waltz that carried her to the patio curtains. She threw them open and smirked back at him. "When are you going to get tired of mentioning me and 'doing' in the same breath?"

"Possibly when you put some more clothes on." He finally turned to her as he rested on his side, meeting the displeasure that momentarily infected her moonlit face.

"That's perilously close to a complaint, So," she warned, holding her thumb and index finger molecules apart. Perhaps Mana did not react to the hurt in his eyes because there was not enough light to reflect it. Regardless, the look was quickly ironed out of his brow.

"I don't have a reason in the world to complain about staring at you…neither do all the men outside you're providing a free show for."

She scoffed. "Oh, you mean all the men standing outside on the beach with night vision goggles that happen also to be staring up at the twenty-third floor at four o'clock in the morning? All _those_ men?"

"_We're_ up at four o'clock, are we not?"

"_Are we not?_" the girl parroted mockingly. "Look, if some perv comes all the way up here just to get a peek at my skinny behind, I think they've earned it. Don't you? The only ones disturbing our peace right now anyway are Miyazawa and Arima."

On cue, a euphoric shriek rose through the wall closest to the head of the mattress, and Mana could not help laughing.

So looked confused.

"Oh, come on!" she started, jerking a thumb in the direction of their…busy…high school classmates. "You don't think that's funny?"

So looked confused.

"Because! They're all like…" The girl pumped both of her firsts three times in rapid succession, "and we can hear everything, and they don't even care! And we _know_ them! You don't think that's hilarious?"

"Ah, I see. An apology is in order." His lopsided grin became a lazy, mischievous thing. "You were being funny the entire time and I did not laugh once-"

"Shut up or I'll kill you!" Mana yelled, even as the credibility of her threat was undermined by her infectious grin and wobbly white crane stance. "I'll do it, too. I was a spy, you know. You'd die like fifteen times before you even hit the ground."

"But I'm already lying down. And how do you kill someone who's already died?"

"What…what do you mean by…you are _so_ _fatal_, you know that?" Mana lowered her leg and stared back out over New Goza Beach. Her profile grew solemn, tempered.

"Did…was I really that noisy?"

"I prefer 'hilarious', but noisy is equa…just as appropriate."

She breathed silently, and then turned to her boyfriend with lifeless eyes. "Didn't I just finish warning you?"

She was dashing before he could open his mouth, reaching for something in the armchair, carmine locks whirling as she spun on him. "KIRISHIMA CLAN SECRET TECHNIQUE! FLIGHT OF THE SHURIKEN PLUSHIE!"

"How secret could it be of you tell-OW!" he managed before the twirling toss pillow smashed into his face. She tried not chuckling at the cute way he writhed in pain, and succeeded. She giggled instead.

"You big, bony baby," Mana admonished, climbing on the bed beside him as he cupped his nose. She mussed his black hair as he groaned again. "Let me see…"

By the time the teenager had pried his hands open and smiled down at Souichi, she was sitting on him. Pressing into him. Kissing him, again. Rising slightly, just enough so that the tips of their noses brushed. Then descending to put her lips over his and crush his tongue with her own, first into his mouth, then out of his and into hers. Rising. Descending. Up. Down. In. Out. Lost now, in the essential, cardinal rhythm of doing and not doing, doing and not doing.

Mostly doing.

"You just took a shower," he whispered.

"I'll get dirty and I'll take another shower," she finally said, "and you can come with me." She paused, maneuvering on top of him so that there was no space between his pelvis and her own. "I don't like being funny, So. I don't like being laughed at. I want to be taken seriously. I want to be an executioner. We have all weekend to make me an assassin."

"If that's what you desire," he said, looking up at something through the back of her head.

"That's what _we_ desire," Mana corrected him, serenading him with kisses to reinforce her point. "Don't get any weirder, now's not the time."

Before she could shut him up he was saying more. Getting weirder. "But, I feel it in you. Finally, I'm certain it's something I could never hope to gratify by simply-"

"_What_…" she growled, the seductive ardor tingeing her voice all but strangled by growing choler. "What the _hell_ are you talking about? _We_, So, as in _us together_, decided to come out to Shima because_you_ liked the beach. I wanted to go to the hot springs, remember? I don't see where this 'Oh, I'm doing all this for little Mana's sake' crap is coming from."

"The same place it's always come from. I only chose where we would stay because letting me choose gave you joy."

"Gave…gave me _joy_?" She sat up, mouth agape. "I don't believe this."

"I…I'm being forward, but your anger…it's unfounded. I don't mean that being with you is undesirable. Far from it."

She blinked. "Oh…well, I'm glad you liked deflowering me. Get to the point."

"You were thinking of him."

The girl did, said, and possibly saw and heard nothing at first. Then she calmly rolled off of the boy, found a soft, cool pillow, smashed it into her face and screamed.

"Mana…" he breathed, eyeing her with quiet concern, "I wasn't making a judgment. Only an observation. I feel it through your shirt, I smell it on your breath. You taste like it. And…I'm okay with it. It's about time you were, also."

Mana stilled as she lay on her back beside So, and exhaled behind the plump cushion. Only then did she let him know how okay she was by blindly backfisting him in the sternum. She sat up, the look in her wet, shining eyes oblivious to his newfound agony.

"Nakajima…_Souichi_…this was supposed to be _our_ night. You know what that means? Me,_not_ talking about guys I fawned over years and years ago. You, NOT passive-aggressively guilt tripping me about having a place for him, when it's something I couldn't do anything about if I tried."

"N-not passive aggressive," he breathed when he could finally…breathe. "I'm satisfied, knowing I'm only a …substitute. Because now I know what you're hoping for. You're sustained by just the dream of an opportunity. And it all makes you…perfect."

"You are, by far…_far_…the weirdest boyfriend I've ever had. I just needed to get that off of my chest."

"Noted."

"Perfect…" A bitter smirk, a shudder from Mana, passing on as she ran her hands through damp clumps of dirty red. She snapped to him, glaring. "Look at me, So. Are you looking?"

The whole of him was a dim dark blue, but her eyes narrowed when she saw him nod.

"_So_…you. Are_not_. An EMPATH. You are some skinny dude that caught my eye on the class trip, when I went back for a third helping of cheddar biscuits in the buffet line at Cactus Kojima's. And if you can't wrap your brain around the fact that my thoughts were of you, only_you_ when I let you in…I will regret this."

"You called me Shinji."

Mana Kirishima turned her back to him and quietly wept. The noise that had been floating in from the neighboring room had ceased.

"Don't you _touch_ me," she commanded when he had tried, but did nothing when he still clasped her trembling shoulder. If the purpose was to staunch her silent tears, he had succeeded.

"This was going to be it," Mana suddenly blurted, still facing away from So as confusion proctored her wavering voice. "You know? I was going to come here with you, and…and after that he'd just be obsolete. Easy."

The young woman endured another slight tremor, but it diffused when So's grip tightened.

"And it's so_stupid_, because I was just _using_ him! When he found out he wasn't even mad. I think…think I wanted him to be like his dad. I was waiting for him to just snap and choke the shit out of me. Or shoot me in the head. I'm still waiting." She sighed then, a sudden, angry rush of air. "But he was so good it made me sick."

She made that noise again, and choked back the sorrow lodged in her throat.

"He's dead. Ten times over. They massacred everyone at Nerv. I heard they shot or they burned them all. He's not even _real_, anymore. He's KILLING me and HE'S NOT EVEN _TRYING_! I…" It was a full minute before Mana reined herself in, finally saying, "I can't even hate him for it, and it makes me _sick_ because it's all_so_…"

"Fair."

"I should've known better than to lie to someone who finishes my sentences."

"You'll see him again."

"And that's the worst thing you've ever said to me."

The tug on her shoulder was impossibly light, but the specter of force alone rolled Mana onto her back. Cerulean pools were riveted by something in a far dark corner as he hovered above her. She flinched when he spoke, anyway.

"You have to know that now is not the best time to be inconsistent."

"…meaning?"

"That you should believe me."

"Fine…" Mana's eyes finally swiveled to meet his own with fledgling resolve. "Now I want to talk about something less embarrassing. Like when I caught grandma doing it with Mister Saito-"

"No you don't."

The resolve decomposed. Her shirt rode up her thighs in bunches as she squirmed beneath him. "Just…I have to _forget_. For a few minutes."

"No."

"_So_, come _on_. I won't…don't want to think about him this time-"

"But you will." He was looking through her, again.

Mana Kirishima tried not shivering, merely teared up as she finally gave in. "And…and I'll see him again?"

"Because you're perfect," So reiterated.

"If you say so…" She laughed abruptly, a roiling, delirious sound. "God, you sound like you have connections or something."

"Or something," he said.

"…touch it…"

He did.

* * *

Shinji's leisurely, yet purposeful stroll to Mihiro Kamakura's residence was not interrupted by the urgent, blaring wail of Tokyo-3's (well-practiced) emergency broadcast network. He was not followed by stupidly conspicuous unmarked carbon black cruisers, occupied by stone-faced drones that draped hard eyes with equally black Raybans. He always thought they were Raybans for some reason.

The nineteen year-old crested a steep incline blanketed with the shuffling shadow of cherry trees. He looked on the other side, and nothing monstrous, nothing menacing and xenocidal -nothing that would justify the intrusion of the first two things- drifted on currents of omniscience, waked by the blight of death and the fetor of rank terror.

Blight would have been good. Terror would have fit the bill. Anything to fill the space between him and Mana, the thought of whom had been tormenting him since the night he had, much to her delight, run himself ragged playing at her stupid game. Until Asuka had looked at him.

_Well, almost anything_…

At the moment, his mind's eye peered beyond an illimitable nothing, and the Kirishima girl never failed to look back.

It was a questioning look.

Right now, it was just him and that look, the sound of air rushing over a passing Toyota, and pockets of radiant warmth that spilled through pores of discomposing shade.

It had been a dissecting look.

Soon, it would be him, and Mihiro, and her…be brave…her lessons. And that made him genuinely sad. Not the kind of sad that consumed the former spy, the sadness wrought by deprivation, by denial. By rejection.

It had been a tortured look.

Three weeks ago was the last time he had actual physical proof this Mana girl existed outside of the psychiatric therapist's wet dream customarily referred to as Shinji's Brain. This…was not fair to her. She was now more than the sum of Asuka and Misato, and any other jerk that thought, wouldn't it be totally awesome if I were, like, some undead memory of someone that Ikari boy knew, y'know, the one with that white shirt and black pants? Doesn't he wear anything else? Yes, I do. But I had to go straight from school to Nerv and you'd wear the same damn thing too, if you had to stay in that high-tech dungeon forever then drowned and stripped naked and stared at by full-grown women and your father and now he was talking to himself. Not anymore, though. Excluding the last thought. And the last one. And the one before this one-

He lost track.

-_aight_ _from school to Nerv and you'd_ _nev_-

Back.

-_ally awesome if I were, like, some undead memory of someone that Ik_-

Back.

-_sum of Asuka and_-

Right there.

-Misato, simply by virtue of the fact that he could, theoretically, touch and hold a conversation with Kirishima, and not give in to the urge to spoon his brains out and make them part of this balanced breakfast. But it had been three weeks…

Did she still look like that? Like he owed her more than just some pathetic mealy-mouthed excuse for why he had twice already ripped her heart out?

He could call and find out. He could visit. He could plunk down two-hundred yen and be at Keio University within the half hour. No later than ten minutes afterward he could slip behind her as she cleaned and organized an assortment of graduated cylinders. Within the space of time it would take her to sense his presence and whirl to meet his gaze, he would know if he could ever call or visit again. He could see her grey blue eyes scuttling him, killing him, telling him 'no' before her mouth did.

She could say no.

Shinji Ikari's stomach flopped when he could not tell what frightened him more: Yes…or _no_.

The front door to the Kamakura household was ajar, and as the nineteen year-old made his presence known, removed his shoes and placed them next to a lonely pair of loafers, he moved Mihiro's parents up to number four on his personal list of Most Unfit Guardians of All Time ©.

It was sad the Kamakuras could not balance the vast financial success they had achieved with even meager communion, if just for their only daughter who, in Shinji's mind, was the adage 'desperate cry for attention' given human form…and on one impossibly awkward occasion, an aluminum bat taken to the hood of daddy's Lexus.

Boring old run-of-the-mill negligence was not enough to displace the top three spots.

Number one was a lock. Always had been. Always would be.

He entered the sunlit study room tucked in a cozy first floor nook, found Mihiro Kamakura in it, and immediately -and justifiably- bumped her parents to the number one spot.

Because she was dead.

"_Mi_…_Mihi_…_ro_…" He started, truncating his choked whisper when he realized the glint from her scarlet halo was the dull shine from something gelled. She had probably been lying on the carpet in her navy blue fuku for some time, with one leg bent outward at the knee as she smiled.

Oh _no_, she was_smiling_…

The roiling bile leapt when he began to ask himself questions. The terrible answers crushed him into the plush, beige carpet.

Who did this? Who would do this? How long had she been alive, awake, waiting and grasping at thinning strands of life so father, or mother, could save her? Had she been waiting for _him_? Or just waiting to die?

**She had been waiting too long. That and nothing else matters. You are the savior of despair, nothing more.**

"I…I'm so…_Mihiro_…"

Here she was, yet another ghost to taint his waking life and nurture his mania. Another that would watch and blame him with living eyes, even though all things surrounding them were lost to corporeal existence years ago, eternities ago…

And all he could do was kneel before the broken child as her house fell away, and sounds were lost to the nameless void.

"MIHIRO, I'M SORRY!"

His face was pinching, his sanity listing as he fought the welling tears.

Why? Do it for her. Weep for her as you would not for Asuka, for Misato. As you could not for Rei, for Kaworu.

**Your solstice wanes before the hot tide of blood. Weep, to honor her and her sacrifice, for she has been brought low with the worms to thaw _you_, son of Ikar**-

"_PSYCH!_"

The dead girl's eyes shot wide as she leapt to standing and hopped around like a springbok on Prozac, raining gales of puckish laughter down upon Shinji. Who remained kneeling, mourning a brat-shaped indentation in the floor as the realization filtered through his grief-stricken haze; he had just been unquestionably, thoroughly…_punk'd_.

"I got you so good! You were about to pee and everything!"

"Yeah…"

"Oh man!" She giggled, smacking the back of his bowed head as she indulged in a one-on-one game of duck-duck-goose. "You shoulda seen your face! You were all like, 'Oh no, sweet little Mihiro! Someone came in here and bashed your head in with a shot put!'"

"Yeah…"

"_Awwww_…don't be sore," Mihiro chided as it suddenly dawned on him how deliciously ironic it would be if he just up and choked the life out of her. No, not ironic. Stupid.

She ran some fingers through clumps of her supposedly bloodstained hair, coming away with sticky, synthetic crimson. "See? They're just dye packs for squibs. My cousin works for Tsuburaya, I got a whole box of these in my room."

Shinji faced her as the last of the adrenalin seeped away. "Would you also happen to have your cello in your room?"

"You can be a real au pair when you want to be," the young teen huffed, "you know that, Shinji?"

"Yeah."

"You know what I mean?"

"Uh-huh."

"See what I'm getting at, here?"

"Yup."

"You following me?"

"_Yes_."

"Gettin' my drift?"

"_Yes_, dammit!"

"Berserker…" she mouthed, backing away with feigned discretion. "Well, when you use that tone of voice I _know_ it's time to fetch my weapon of mass disruption, 'cause nothing says 'pinnacle of intellectual endeavor' like the string instrument whose sound most closely resembles the human fart-"

"Just go get it!" he finally yelled as he massaged his temple.

"Alright, _alright_…" She turned to leave the warm room. Then she stopped. "But you would've been sad…right?"

"What?"

"Nothing."

She bounded away and back in short order, hefting the black pear-shaped case above her with, impossibly, meticulous carelessness.

"Be _careful_ with that, Mihiro-"

"Will you chill? For a second? It's not like it's made out of balsa wood. So…chill." She stood the instrument against a near wall to take out a folding chair. "I wouldn't do anything in the world to break it, especially not now."

The beginnings of dread, perhaps instinctively, tickled the part of Shinji's brain that regaled him with those delightful Monday morning migraines. It did not seem to care it was Thursday. At all. "What's happening 'now'?"

"_Right_ now? Nothing. Now as in next Tuesday 'now'? This…" Princess Hellion produced a white envelope that fluttered to his lap with a flick of her delicate wrist. Mihiro sat down with the instrument as he eyeballed it.

Anticipating at least four flavors of doom, Shinji pulled out its paper contents and read it.

Six flavors.

"'Mister Shinji Ikari and one guest of his choosing are cordially invited to the fourth Annual Tokyo-3 Junior High School Summer Instrumental, as per the request of…" He stopped reading just long enough to blast his student with a Level Five Disbelieving Stare. "…of cellist Mihiro '_Ritalin Beast_' Kamakura?"

"I _love_ hearing that!" the girl squealed, balling her small fists under her chin. "Picked it _myself_!"

"I couldn't tell, really," the Third Child mumbled. "You aren't embarrassed by this? I _went_ to Tokyo-3 Junior High, and that auditorium holds almost nine-hundred people. And…and now _all_ of them are going to read that silly nickname when you come out to…to…"

Somewhere, the filament in a dull, dusty light bulb flickered to life.

"YOU'RE GOING TO BE_PLAYING_?"

Kamakura blew at a tuft of ebony hair. "Uh, _duh_? That's why I gave you the stationary?"

Ah, that's right. He had been too busy fighting the urge to laugh maniacally to read the bottom of the invitation, and when he finally did read it, he found it completely necessary to double his efforts.

"Bach's Cello Sonatas? You're doing _Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello_? Do you have any idea how _insane_ this is?"

"Insane enough that I know better than to perform the entire thing," she assured him, her hands moving up and down the bow with rosin. "I'm just gonna do the sixth suite."

He laughed maniacally as the Shinji Ikari Spin Machine finally broke down and erupted into a raging, towering inferno. "But that's the _worst_ one you could've picked! I…_no_, that's the _worst_!"

Her lips went taught with a wan smile. "Y'know, it's pretty hard to feel confident in your abilities when your own mentor doesn't have any faith in you…"

"Why, oh _why_ are you doing this?" he asked, chuckling with disbelief, ignoring the enormous slug of guilt Mihiro's words had lodged in his gut.

Reason with her. Someway, somehow, she was going to see the light at the end of the tunnel…and realize it was a bullet train. He stood over her now to make the truth as clear as possible without…well…telling the truth.

"Okay…remember when I asked you to play an ascending scale in octaves and it took me twenty minutes to explain what an arpeggio was?"

"Vaguely…"

"That was _Tuesday_. Tuesday! And the week before that, I asked you to play an ascending scale in octaves and it took me half an hour to explain what an arpeggio was. And the week before that I asked you to play an ascending scale in octaves and it took me forty minutes to explain what an arpeggio was. Before _that_, I asked you to play an ascending scale in octaves, and then everything smelled like chlorine for some reason, and we looked around your house and we never found out, but after it was all over you _didn't know what an arpeggio was_."

She blinked. There was a pause as the central cooling unit kicked in with a click and a cool convecting breath. She blinked.

"…what's your point?"

The college student was not surprised that he smelled chlorine as he slowly sank to the floor.

"My point," Shinji sighed, looking up at her, "is that you're going to have to cancel."

She had the nerve to look surprised. And oddly enough…fearful? "I can't do that."

"You _are_, because that's the only thing you _can_ do, Mihiro. So tell them something, anything except you're performing. You got sick, family emergency, you're _pregnant_. I don't care what."

The Kamakura girl snorted.

"I think me getting pregnant would constitute a family emergency, and I ain't tellin' them _that_, that's for sure…" She smiled lazily, and then, slowly, placed her soft hand on his shoulder and gently squeezed. "Unless you got something in mind…_teacher_…"

"_No_, you little pervert!" He shot up and away from the thirteen year-old, who cackled as he began pacing the study room. Shinji raked deep troughs of brown hair with fleshy talons. "Next Tuesday…is going to hurt _so_…_much_."

"No it won't," she countered, her soft voice imbued by a heretofore unknown source of…it was confidence. "Dad's gonna be there."

Shinji stopped pacing. And thought.

And thought.

And thought.

"We can do this," he said.

He saw Mihiro roll her eyes out of the corner of his. "That's what I just said, didn't I?"

"We can do this. I've had to deal with worse." _Though rarely with this little time_, said a voice that sounded entirely too much like his own for him to like. He kindly asked it not to let the door hit it on its way out. "Now…all you have to do is practice until your fingers fall off. All of them"

Shinji wished that he could find (and then repeatedly hit with a barbell) the thing that allowed Mihiro Kamakura to live, blissfully, in a world that consisted of little more than temper tantrums, astonishingly cruel practical jokes, and…

"I don't see why I can't just practice for about twenty minutes to keep fresh, like I do everyday."

…and supreme, peerless ignorance.

"_Because_, Mihiro, miracles aren't something that just happen, they're something that people _make_ happen, and if you listen to me and do exactly as I say, we're going to be just fine."

* * *

"We are just so screwed," Shinji established. For the tenth time. This discouraged Maya Ibuki, seeing as she was currently driving them both to the supposed source of her discouragement. She wasted a small moment, pulling her attention away from the violets and vermilions of the Tuesday twilight to glance sideways at her inconsolable passenger. So_that's_ what that noise was…

"Can you please stop beating your head against my window?"

"Sorry." He began beating the back of his skull against the headrest by the time she had turned back to the clustered road. The woman pulled the hem of her charcoal-colored pencil skirt past her knees with a free hand.

Charcoal…pencil…get it?

_Bah, no wonder I gave up on being a comedian in fourth grade._

But the young professional wanted a reason to laugh.

"We are just so screwed."

It was just that the former pilot was not cooperating. The eternal optimist's standard answer to this was, of course, "Well, I think you should just be glad it isn't any worse. The way you've explained it, it sounds like that's possible-"

"And her father's_so rich_, too. I've been tutoring her for over a year, getting paid all this time, and she…_sucks_ just as hard as that first day." Oh well. Shinji Ikari never did respond well to optimism. "Her dad could just…yeah, he's going to have me killed. I just know it. It's like I've been stealing from him."

If he's worried about being murdered, that's a pretty good indicator he wants to live…isn't it?

Maya's eyebrow twitched of its own volition and she quickly rubbed the tension out of the flinching muscle. "Shinji, you're overreacting. Mihiro's not playing for the TSO, just friends and family. And some classmates. This is a _happy_ day."

Her breath suddenly became hesitant as her sedan dove into the cool shadow of a rolling, verdant mountain. "Even if what you say is true…I wouldn't let anything happen to you, anyway."

_There_, he finally smiled, albeit briefly, placatingly. "Thanks, Maya."

"But I still don't understand why you invited me instead of Mana." She knew she was prying, and knew that she wanted to know, regardless. She silently wilted when the back of his head turned to her and the front stared out at the blending milieu.

It was only when she saw Tokyo-3 Junior High rise over a gentle upward slope that he spoke again.

"I wouldn't want Mana to see this, anyway. I want this to be as least embarrassing as possible."

"It's _a middle school_ recital, Shinji-"

"Mihiro goes first. Who knows? Maybe after she finishes I can get out of there before anyone recognizes me."

* * *

"_Before Miss Kamakura begins her performance, she has requested that her instructor for the past fourteen months be acknowledged for his steadfastness in advancing her skills as an instrumentalist. So stand up and be counted, our very own Tokyo-3 Junior High School alumnus, Mister Shinji Ikari!"_

And as soon as the announcer rogered-out, an overhead spotlight swung out over the clapping audience to where Mihiro was pointing. Right at him.

Shinji stood as if waiting for someone to dragon kick him back into his cushioned chair, but he was only showered with blinding light and polite, appreciative applause. He supposed the teachers and parents in attendance thought his protégé's was a splendidly charitable gesture, a demonstration of respect that kids these days just weren't supposed to have.

To Shinji Ikari, that spotlight was the Eye of Sauron. And Mihiro Kamakura was the Devil. That was all there was to it.

The moment had passed, so he reseated himself, wallowing in the perverse hope that an Angel would start blasting craters all over Tokyo-3 proper.

_Oh, that's right…I killed them all…_

"Look at her!" Maya whispered from his right. She nodded at the stage, to the girl in the pleated knee-length black skirt and white short-sleeved button top. "She's so cute!"

"So are Tasmanian Devils-"

"No they're not!" she chided, pinching his bicep rather painfully. "There's nothing you can do now, so please…try to sit back and enjoy it."

Shinji sat back and waited to die.

Thinking about Mana was vastly preferable to actively listening to what the Kamakura girl was about to…um…play. That is what he did, as much for the fact that he couldn't help it as it was to distract him. And it was better than thinking about Asuka, whose presence sometimes made him feel like a human Ouija board.

_God_, he felt guilty. He _was_ guilty. He might as well have been watching an accident unfold at a thousand frames per second. She was letting him do it, a slow, brutal pressing that crushed the life out of the victim like a rat in the coils of a Burmese Python.

Why couldn't Mana Kirishima have been like Yukie Utsumi? Why hadn't she just sighed and cursed him and cut her losses, when he knew that she knew those things would keep her free of the bizarre drama encapsulating someone that hardly cared?

But he _did_ care.

When he traversed the border bisecting his tepid dreamscape and the horrible waking world, in that moment when the controls on his piecemeal ego were foreign and clumsy, he could feel everything. In the weeks since he had last seen her, Mana had always felt the best. _Real_. He would get up to make breakfast, then. It finally tasted _real_. This should be a good thing, a great thing, like sitting before Mihiro's supposedly broken corpse and knowing he had the ability to cry. He could be hurt again and that…oh, shit.

It was that damned look! Concern was merely a secondary ingredient. Shinji felt he could handle concern with the same grey wall he had erected to dam his mind away from all manner of living dead nightmares. Mana had been worried, obviously, but that flash in her eyes, the unwavering, unflinching focus…it was as if he had stolen from her.

Shinji had replayed the last moments of their last encounter, rewound the memory of her face inches from his as her arms encircled him, _claimed_ him. There it was, the thing he lost that day as he tried recovering from his last meeting with Sohryu. Entitlement, birthright, whatever its truest name, there had been a brief, eternal moment that Mana Kirishima became it.

The girl he had last seen preparing for death within the belly of Trident Unit-02, that Mana, she had never looked like that, a realization that made his blood flow like an ice-choked fjord. This all made the woman frightening, beyond the frivolities of infatuation, worriment, sex.

Not frightening like Asuka. But close. Close enough that he knew he could not keep them a day's thoughts away simultaneously. Not forever. That was how that German ghost had gotten close enough to slip him paper and break his heart. That was how she could now tower over him, staring down to swallow him with that black hole in her face that led to nothing in the middle of nowhere. For a fraction of eternity far too long for Shinji Ikari's liking, Mana too became otherworldly, her entirety but a vessel for a vast empyreal crusade.

Or maybe she was just horny. How the hell should he know?

Aside from the fact she liked him, Mana was the most normal woman he knew. Yet still, he could not shake the fact that someone was making love to his ears.

Mihiro Kamakura would have instantly perverted the meaning of that last thought into something foul and deeply, disturbingly lolicon, if not for the fact that she was on the stage and immersed in the enterprise of effecting such flowing, flawless resonance.

She was playing. She was good. She was better than him. She was better than anyone he had ever heard, ever.

Anonymous strains of sorrow mingled and migrated across the girl's face, her furrowed brow and her closed eyes, as she dove into another valley of effortless, seraphic melody. Out again, then segueing into the neighboring movement with the supreme confidence that she dared flashing that last Thursday. Now, it was Tuesday night, and the collage of day-drenched hues had been replaced by a deepening inverted sea of cascading azures, accompanied by Suite Number Six in D Major. _Damn_, she was good.

Shinji broke from his trance long enough to glance at Mihiro's homeroom teacher, who happened to have been sitting to his left. The woman had an almost regal air about her when they had spoken earlier in the evening. This was right up until he had mentioned who he came to the recital for, the girl who was to the woman's composure what dynamite was to a strip mine. She caught his stare with glistening eyes, smiled and mouthed 'thank you'.

There was gentle pressure on his thigh, someone patting it. He was met with Maya's soft, rare 'I told you so' face when he looked in the opposite direction. He conceded with a sheepish smile of his own, even though there hadn't been a single discernable sign in the last year Mihiro Kamakura was, to put it mildly, Cello Jesus. Didn't matter, anyway.

All that he knew was that somewhere, Yo-Yo Ma was suddenly and unexpectedly weeping tears of joy. Of this, Shinji Ikari was quite certain.

* * *

Kodama was asking for something.

The concept never fully registered as 'strange' to Hikari, even though her sister was three years her senior. To say that the Horaki sisters were without a mother was a concept Hikari didn't exactly agree with, either. That was because, for as far back as her high-resolution memories stretched (or as far back as Horaki cared to see), _she_ had been their mother.

Kodama could have been the ones to pack their lunches on all of those crisp, sleepy school mornings, if not for the fact that, on one occasion, the oldest girl had managed to _burn water_. Hikari had logically known (and had later been validated by her general chemistry studies) that such a thing was impossible, and that what had been in the pot was probably some sort of grease. Unfortunately, the memory of blue flames licking the ceiling while Kodama, little Nozomi, and dad tore around the kitchen screaming like pillaged villagers, was irreversibly, utterly indelible.

After that, the kitchen apron was hers. After that, she'd tell -not ask- them to clear the table. After that, she could send Nozomi to her room with a glare.

Hikari Horaki was dead. Long live Kasumi Tendo.

The freckled young woman adjusted the tilt of her neck to make it easier to talk into the phone. Her hands frittered autonomously, skinning potatoes in the apartment's kitchen sink.

Even mothers weren't psychic. Close, but not psychic.

"So, _really_…how is everything going there?

Kodama gave a small, knowing huff. "I _said_ it was all good the last time you asked me."

"Uh-huh. And I'm asking again." Expectancy tinged Hikari's soft tone. "It's completely within my right to ask you until you tell me what's wrong."

"And maybe you hear something wrong because you _want_ to hear something wrong. You know what I mean?"

"I know what you mean." Hikari nodded to herself. "I know…"

Her words hung like the motes of dust catching light above the sink, in which a stream of white water washed the peeled tubers.

Then Kodama sighed.

"I don't know. Hikari, I…it's nothing, just…I'm way too old to get homesick. So I know it's not that."

"Why not? Why are you too old? Twenty-two's too old?"

There was a shaking intake of air. "I guess not. I'm being silly. I mean, I'm making all kinds of good money here, and Nagano's beautiful. But I can't…" She sighed again. "How about you?"

The middle Horaki was grateful that Kodama could not see her smile. "I'm too young to be getting empty nest syndrome."

The young professional laughed. "Why not? Why are you too young? Nineteen's too young?"

Hikari washed the sediment from her hands and dried them. "You and Nozomi don't really need me to tell you what not to do, not anymore, at least. And dad never did. We all…we just got used to it. We got used to worse things."

"Worse things…" Kodama repeated, "you didn't answer my question."

"If you're asking if I miss being the official Horaki maid…no. And I've got an emergency daughter living with me now, in case I do get a little homesick. I…"

Hikari turned on a whim, cupping the phone as she said, "I didn't get to ask you about your test today-"

"Failed it."

Hikari was now facing Mana, resisting the fledgling cringe pulling at her mouth as she took in the sorry, disheveled state of her best friend.

"It's okay, though," the redhead said. "They drop one exam at the end of the term. So everything's good."

Hikari wasn't psychic. Didn't need to be. "Then you don't have any reason to look like that. I'm going to put some food in you, and then you're finally going to get yourself togeth-"

"I need to use the phone."

Hikari's eyes lingered on Mana's, and she was suddenly, oddly thankful the kitchen phone was cordless.

"Kodama? I'll call you back…"

End of Chapter 4

A/N: If it seemed as if there wasn't much plot progression, that's because chapters 4 and 5 were originally one chapter. It got long. Damn long. I'm hoping chapter 5 will be done in two weeks.

Yeah, I created the Mihiro character and introduced Mana, so it was time to flesh them out. Hopefully, it'll work out for both the purposes of plot progression and character development. Thank you for the feedback. Thanks to Somewhere N of A for the forum pub, much appreciated. Hopefully I can validate some of this good faith.

Just to reiterate, I've been answering questions in my LiveJournal. Hope no one thinks I'm ignoring them…

Random A/N: I smell chlorine…

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	6. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 5

By MidnightCereal

She got away.

Oh, yes she did. She was promised two painless, bookless, testless, lectureless weeks. She was promised time that was hers to waste, minutes, hours -vast, consecutive sums of both- _not_ used to better herself. Perhaps used even to retrogress, to degenerate.

Yes, slink back into an olid, slovenly shell. Ignore the phone. Screw the dishes. Let them soak in the sink until green things start growing on them, things with smells. The written word is for losers, read nothing with more than three syllables. Pick your nose when you're sure no one is looking. Reasonably sure. Break wind. Blame it on little sis. Blame it on dad.

_That's right. Sure wasn't me. Hikari Horaki cuts many cheeses, save for one. _

Oh! And that thing! With your eyes closed and the blackness, and you feel nothing unless it's that dream with Touji, the one in your bedroom at three thirty-three in the morning and then you feel _everything_…

_I'm going to sleep. It's going to happen. Spring semester is over and the deepest thought I will have in the next fourteen days is 'the'. No work. And sleep. Magnificent oblivion. _

However, that she was so excited, so hell-bent on not being conscious for the next hundred hours, called into question her current station. Back in Tokyo-3. A grocery store. Buying produce and a liter of bleach. Two liters…they were out of the smaller containers.

It was a mistake she had made -a foolish rookie mistake, really- of prefacing her trip from Keio with a phone call.

Nozomi wanted tempura for dinner. And apparently, there was something green growing on the dishes in the sink. That pretty mush explained why she was bagging okra. And scallops. And kobocha. And soba. And also why she had invested in two liters of sodium hypochlorite–dammit!

_Stupid labels. _

That's right. Stupid labels. Stupid heavy bags and stupid walk to the bus stop. Why on Earth did she tell Nozomi that she was coming home with just one piece of luggage? Why'd she turn down little sis' offer of a car ride back home? Besides the fact that Hikari Horaki liked her internal organs just the way they were currently arranged? No reason.

If she wasn't careful, she was going to start thinking again, worrying as she walked/staggered to the depot, which was a sunny, noisy spring block away. Too bad she hadn't been able to talk her roommate into spending the break at the Horaki residence. Hikari could have at least had help with the bags. It turned out that convincing Mana Kirishima to set a single toe back into the Tokyo-3 Metropolitan Area was easier said, begged, bribed and blackmailed, than done.

The two freshmen had not spent one night in their third floor flat before Mana stopped between mouthfuls of udon to explain how it was she had become so close to Shinji Ikari. Only now could Hikari admit to herself that she had been half-listening, mentally organizing her hectic first semester schedule…until Mana said the _E_ word. That the eighteen year-old had been a government spy and had operated black program mecha were instantly relegated to sub-tertiary footnotes.

Knowing Shinji Ikari, Asuka, Nerv _and_ Evangelion was as sure a recipe for total emotional collapse as anything in Hikari Horaki's wonderfully brutal experiences. Anyone who knew those people, those things…_those_ things…deserved an empathy the former class representative could not manufacture. Not anymore.

She had tried, nevertheless. She had hugged Mana that night. Mana had cried herself to sleep, alone in her room.

Mana. Alone. Again. Waving goodbye at the front door and 'smiling'…please, these grocery bags were less plastic.

Now _there_ was a woman that liked her solitude. Kirishima didn't request it too frequently, and never at an inconvenience to her flat mate, but when it came the brunette always granted it. It was always absolute.

Fifteen minutes at a time. An hour. Half a day…and then ninety-six consecutive hours in February. Horaki could take an educated stab at what memories imprisoned Mana for four straight days, coming to the realization that it must be something worth knowing…which meant she really didn't want to know at all.

Darn it, it was hot, and Hikari could feel the cotton of her blue buttoned blouse clinging to her waist like a warm towel. She wanted to be home now, not sticky and weighed down by squash and third-person angst. It was because of this the young adult at first did not question, but rather luxuriated in having the burden on her right shoulder alleviated. She looked to her side and up, finding it imperative to choke down a gasp.

Then Souichi Nakajima blinked, and whatever it was that had unnerved her was lost to confusion.

"For…for a second," she started, "you had looked…never mind."

"Never mind what, Miss Horaki?"

"Do you know…? Forget it. As long as I don't have to carry that bleach and the T-16 gets here on time." Hers was a cursory glance, an economic, subtle scan that ran over and assessed the black tousle of short spikes that crowned him and obscured his eyes. She tried looking at least, but he had since turned forward to smile at some distant vanishing point.

The hair, the eyes…that smile. Hikari now knew why Mana was into him…_had_ been into him. Regardless, memories, pictures, thoughts of Nakajima were easily shared by his ex-girlfriend, due in no small part to the fact Mana had the luxury of an amicable breakup. Mana had the luxury of a breakup. Of goodbye…

"Small world," she said in a small voice before speaking louder. "Who'd think of all places you'd turn up in my hometown?"

His eyebrows swung down and up again like broken second hands. Nothing was broken about So's smile. "You sound certain I should have shown up elsewhere. Why is that, Miss Horaki?"

"Hikari's fine. And it's just that there are better places to show up. Much better." Then stupid things came out of her mouth. "I'm saying that Mana's not too far from here. Did you know that? And after you two split up, she never heard anything else from you. Not that she was trying very hard to find you-"

"Then all is as it should be." As he looked ahead once more, she imagined something unpleasant crawling just beneath his opaque simper. Ugh.

"Oh no…do you think I'm prying? I'm not prying!" She sighed. "Yes I am. I'm just saying that you confused her, that's all. She said you made so much sense that it never really made sense, whatever the heck that means. Stop me if you've heard this before."

"I haven't." The young man shrugged as his grin faltered for all of a millisecond. "Being reminded of it…is not as painful as I'd imagined it to be. Our breakup was amicable, after all."

See?

"But I don't understand. Mana's goodbye…it was one of conviction. I had envied it. It would pain me if I had left her and her heart had remained weak."

"You make it sound like it was some kind of job."

His laugh, a sound bereft of true mirth, lacked also scorn. "A splendid job. And I thought I had succeeded. Her choice was quite clear."

Hikari had been puzzling over the young man's diction, concurrently formal and unorthodox. But mostly weird. She managed to capture his last words, which pressed against her brain until understanding seeped through. "Her…choice?"

"Her heart, it is such a wonderful thing, Miss Horaki. You feel whole again beneath it, so much freedom merited by gentle sovereignty…until she hits you." He thoroughly ignored the roaming eyes of a passing schoolgirl. "Aside from that, what price is there? Other than a cheap, feckless irony? She should trust in her heart. Not one person would reject it."

He allowed gravity from a severe thought to bow his mouth again. "Not one person that is worth saving…"

_Got it._ "I don't even know what it takes to be that noble. Don't get me wrong. I want to be happy for Mana and Shinji. It's not that easy for me, So." She felt momentarily annoyed. "And call me Hikari."

He adjusted the grip on the bag in his left hand as he tried to look surprised. "You're not happy for her?"

"Well, what about?" she asked, silently counting cracks in the pavement. They turned a corner as she thought of what to say. "It's not like she's been seeing him. She hasn't even talked to him in five years. I mean, if it wasn't for me, she wouldn't even know he was alive."

Now _that_ had been an interesting night…

"She's scared," Hikari sighed. "She doesn't want to come here, and she wouldn't know what to say to him. God, she wouldn't even…well, actually she would know what to _do_. But she's just scared, So."

_She should be_, said something stygian and pitted in Hikari's mind. Because to her admittedly outdated knowledge, Shinji Ikari was no more alive than Touji Suzahara. Having a warm body, going to class, breathing and eating lunch were prerequisites, sure. But for heaven's sake, you had to do more than _that_! Hikari had silently, sadly watched Shinji from afar during each and everyone one of their blissfully uneventful high school days, and she could not recall the former pilot ever doing more than _that_.

Case in point: The former class representative was to matchmaking what the former class representative was to matchmaking. This was to say Hikari Horaki had no peer when it came to finding the two most severely traumatized, socially inept or pitifully needy creatures in all of Tokyo-3, and then slamming them into each other like ions in a particle accelerator. In retrospect then, it had not been a terribly awesome idea to hook Shinji up with fellow class representative Yukie Utsumi.

Whose boyfriend had just died.

That the attractive dark-eyed girl had been falling back on a wholly unrequited love that dated back to Sohryu-era Tokyo-3, should have occurred to Hikari before she had engineered a meeting between Madam Rebound and The Boy That Would Not Blink. After a week it had been too late. After about three months, it had been too loud, too angry, too belligerent, too nasty. Too crushed. Shinji had shrugged though it all, and when it was all over he had quietly muttered something about cake. Huh?

Hikari did not care what Souichi said that Mana said. Horaki could love Shinji like a brother only if he'd let her, but that didn't mean that Mana should have to live through the unpleasantry of seeing what very little was left of him.

Mana Kirishima should not see Shinji Ikari at all.

"She'll see him again," said So.

"Well…that bothers me. And it would bother you, too, if you knew Shinji." She smiled a bit, not really feeling happy. "It's kind of a prerequisite when you play matchmaker. I learned that the hard way."

"And I am nothing if not qualified…"

"What in the world does that mean?" She was getting just a little tired of him speaking over her head, and was unwilling to let this bit of oddness fly under the radar.

"It means that you should take the C-8 back through district six."

Well, that wasn't random at…she took note of her surroundings.

"Wait, this isn't my bus stop…" It only seemed to get hotter and louder as they approached a depot chaperoned by empty plastic benches. They had passed her stop. Oh _God_, why hadn't she paid attention to where they were walking? This crap was heavy! "I gotta go back. I'll miss it in the next minute."

"This _is_ the correct stop," he stated with assuredness that bordered on obnox…no, screw that, it _was_ obnoxious-

"You know what? Gimme my bleach." She snatched the plastic sac from his long fingers as a bus -_not_ the T-16- was breaking toward them with a high-pitched metallic squeal. Hikari eyed the digital display below her upturned palm.

**3:48:59**

Thank goodness, she wasn't late.

**3:49:01**

Now she was.

"_Great_."

Yeah…wasn't it _great_ she would have to wait twenty-four minutes for anoth…back up.

Her house was in district six. How did he know where she lived? How did Souichi even know _her_? After all, he and Mana had met and dated and broken up all before Hikari started rooming with the carmine-haired girl. Kirishima did not have any pictures of Hikari back then, either. Someone else might have, however…

"Souichi," she began, emerging from that last cocoon of thought, "you _know_ Shinji, don't you?" She turned to him, intent on extracting the truth behind his words, his eyes and smile. But those things were gone, as was the rest of him.

Somehow…somehow he had just _gone_.

"So? Souichi?" Hikari turned in a slow circle, slower than the sorry explanations that came to her for why she and her bags were suddenly, entirely alone.

"This isn't funny!"

"Do I look like I'm laughing?"

Curt impatience turned her back to the road. She found her view of the traveled asphalt blocked by a Tokyo-3 Municipal Metro bus (_not_ the T-16), shuddering as it idled. The middle-aged operator frowned down at her beyond the opened door in order to make it easier to dislike him.

"No you don't," she said.

If possible, even more things crawled up his ass and died…_oops_, did she really just think that? Asuka would've been proud.

"_Funny_. Ma'am, I have to be in Kojiri in eleven minutes. Are you getting on or not?"

"I just…um…" When it occurred to her that staring harder at the spot Souichi Nakajima had occupied did nothing to make him un-vanish, Hikari hastily gathered up her clothes, cleansers and perishables to board the northbound C-8.

_He was there. And then he was not._

She had to catch herself as the vehicle lunged forward and merged into traffic. What was that jerk so snarky about? There couldn't have been more than eight other people on the stupid bus. Express or not, none of them looked to be in much of a hurry. Or awake…or sober.

This all made it that much easier to take a seat and a breath, to forget about recalcitrant roommates and their pontificating, disappearing ex-boyfriends. All that mattered was that she was going home and Kensuke Aida was staring at her. What?

Yup, there he was. The brown eyes behind those ovular rims accounted for the groceries and luggage wrapped around her narrow torso. Putting zero and zero together, the sandy-haired man grinned up at her.

"I would've thought you'd have taken the T-16 back home."

"Yeah," she gave a small, small laugh, "me too." Hoping that nothing on her freckled face hinted at the confusion that caught up to and abruptly seized her, she reciprocated Kensuke's hospitality and lowered herself in the seat next to his.

_Forget about it. You're home._

Holy crap. He was really gone.

* * *

Shinji stood in the dim backstage with Maya, watching as his jubilant student bounded up to them. The last thing he expected was for Mihiro to kick him in the shin. Hence, it came as a great surprise when Mihiro kicked him in the shin.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" he heard Maya ask while he knelt and massaged his throbbing leg. Right on the bone! It's like her shoes were made of Painium.

Mihiro apologized with a derisive snort. "Lady, I'm just doing what his girlfriend's gonna do for not being invited. Same thing I'm gonna do to Shinta…"

"He didn't come?" Shinji asked, unfolding himself as he blinked back tears. Maya was frowning, now.

Mihiro's narrowed eyes shot to a corner with stacked sand bags before snapping, "Like I even care what that jerk does."

Crossing her arms fitfully, she tried swallowing her own lie before surprising him with a sober stare. "I really wanted to meet Mana, teacher."

"And how do you know I'm not Mana?" Maya interjected with valiant cheer. "I still sometimes pass for nineteen or twenty."

"Far be it from me to intrude on other people's fantasies," laughed Mihiro, looking the woman up and down. "I'm hope _I'm_ that positive when I get that old-"

"I didn't tell Mana because I didn't think she'd be interested," Ikari blurted. He slowly rubbed Maya's opposite shoulder as the…uh…old woman simmered. "I mean, not that you weren't interesting. You were fantastic."

Kamakura shook her head of straight black hair. "I know you're saying lots of different placating things, but all I keep hearing is, 'please, Mihiro, kick me in the shins.' If you can't understand why Mana would be upset then you need to be. And you're welcome, by the way."

"For…for what?"

"For getting you tickets into Fujikyu Highlands so we can all celebrate my performance, _hello_? Dad got me season park passes, a bunch of them."

"Wonderful," he muttered.

"_Isn't_ it? Now you don't have to make up anymore sorry excuses for why you won't introduce me to your girlfriend instead of just coming out and saying you didn't want me to embarrass you in front of her because that's what you thought would happen!"

"Uh…" He blinked. "Thank you?"

"You are quite welcome," the girl repeated cordially. "You gotta make her feel needed, teacher. I mean, after that one time you never ever talked about her."

"I don't talk about a lot of things, Mihiro."

The smirk that moved across her heart-shaped visage was a little too knowing for comfort. And by a little, he meant a lot. "I know that, but it isn't like it isn't one of those things that you shouldn't not talk about. Right?"

"………………Right?"

"Of course I'm right," Mihiro established. "I'm cupid. I'm awesome."

Before Shinji even knew what he was saying he was saying it. "Who in their right mind would give you a bow and arrow?"

**THWACK**.

"Stop kicking him!"

"…I'm awesome," Mihiro reiterated for reasons known only to herself. "And I'm tired and I'm hungry. What're you going to do about it, teacher?"

"Is…is there any answer I can give that won't result in you kicking me again?"

"I don't believe you're striking the correct tone regarding my dole of gratitude suffused with a vague limerent subtext, my dear L-O."

As his brain attempted to capsize, Shinji realized that she said that with a completely straight face.

"But to answer your question, introvertedmentorprovidingcongratulatorydinnerforvirtuosoviolincellistsayswhat."

"What?"

Mihiro beamed. "_You're_ awesome. Let me go get my stuff."

He felt his face twist in the proverbial wind as the girl skipped off, presumably to 'get her stuff'. "I missed something. What did I miss?"

"You're taking her to dinner," said Maya. "I'm not old."

They began making their way offstage and the Third Child shook his head, one part disbelief, two parts burgeoning headache. "Unbelievable. Over a year I've been trying to get her to play _Baa-Baa Black Sheep_, and this _whole_ time she's had more class in her little finger than I do in my entire-"

* * *

"-sphincter. But I'm tellin' you, if I ever have to stick my arm in a mare's ass again, it'll be too soon."

And that was more than Shinji had ever wanted to know about artificial horse insemination.

Mihiro kept elaborating anyway…with enthusiasm…and a visual aid…and _come on_, who carries something like that in their pocket?

He squirmed beneath the hot lamp irradiating their restaurant booth, and was appropriately disconcerted when he swore the bratwurst populating his specialty plate squirmed also. His periphery caught Maya sitting to his right, and he correctly interpreted her expression, which quite clearly said, '_Urp'_.

"W-what did you say your IQ was, again?" Shinji asked, hoping to abate the disgusting tide and give himself less to think about. Perhaps it was also the conflagration of sloshed, harmony-challenged salarymen, the flare-festooned chorus of uniformed birthday well-wishers, the shrieking babies, and the shrieking babies, that made his head stabout three percent increase in cox countering with six hundred grams panadol increase to six fifty nothing to just cephalgia worry about to minimize coeval dsyexecutive activity negitirt to hurt.

"One sixty-eight," said Mihiro, before leaning over her empty plate to point at Maya's untouched soujouk. "You gonna eat that?"

The tight-lipped scientist still looked a little urp-y, and no sooner did she shake her head did Mihiro stab the broiled ground beef with her fork. "I _love_ Sausage Tuesdays! They have so much sausage here, especially on Tuesday."

"I'm just glad I can do something for you, Mihiro, because I get the feeling that after the first few weeks you didn't need me to teach you anything."

Mihiro swallowed. "Nope."

Shinji threw his hands up and laughed. Almost. "I knew it! That whole time you were just jerking me around! You've been screwing with me and you were really Nina Kotova in a skirt!"

The young cellist blinked rapidly. "Uh…Nina Kotova _is_ a woman, teacher."

"I'm not your teacher, anymore. And you'd be forgetful too if you found out your student's been lying to you for over a year, for no good reason at all."

"I liked the company…" From out of nowhere, pitch-black threadbare candor.

The thin man was a thousand times grateful the girl had been looking down and cutting into her food as she said it. Hoping the heat in his face wasn't too glaring, he found the resolve to meet her smile.

"It's not really in your best interests to complain anyway," she continued, "but I guess getting paid better than fifty percent above the median for classical instrument tutors isn't enough incentive to stay in the game. I'm sure dad'll be more than understanding."

"Are…are you blackmailing me into _getting_ paid?"

"I suppose not," she sighed. "If dad really gave a crap I wouldn't have had to bum a ride to my own _fucking_ recital."

"I didn't know that…I'm sorry."

"Well, I'm glad _someone_ is, even if it isn't their fault. I wouldn't think I'd be able to intimidate someone who had to fight _giant alien monsters_, anyway."

He barely kept from gasping. Maya could not.

"I…I never talked about…how did you know?"

"I didn't," admitted Mihiro, "not until you just told me."

He felt Maya kick him in the shin.

The thirteen year-old leaned back in her seat, shrugging, looking content. "I had my suspicions. Did you know mom used to work at Nerv? She still won't tell me what she did there, which is effed in the butt hole 'cause she was always there, but _anyway_, she had this slip of the tongue one day. 'Shinji the Third Children', something like that. There's more than one of you."

"Was."

"Oh…" Her eyes swung up to him with dread. "Oh _gawd_…you two aren't gonna have to kill me now, are you?"

Ikari blanched. "Don't even joke…"

She fitted her face with a wan smile before planting her ebliminary readings negative still no change parallel wave border stability unchanged since zero zero nine cox level maintained at don't concentrate on that right now just log the barrier integrity as long as we maintain his eows on the heavy polished oak.

What kept doing that? His head was still hurting. It was getting worse.

Mihiro's large brown eyes wandered around his face. "You're practically a superhero, you know that? God, you even cook your ass off!"

Now Maya was razing him with lidded eyes. "You _cook_ for her?"

"Seriously, are you supposed to be his mother? I mean, what?"

"_Mihiro_…" Shinji reflexively chided.

"Not his mother-"

"But I like cooking. You know that, Maya. I really don't see any harm in making her some real food since her parents don't really…oh _no_-"

"It's all good," Kamakura's daughter said, quietly killing off Shinji's fledgling apology. "It's not like you're lying or saying something I don't say myself, like, all the time. To their faces. You're right. I probably won't see mom for another two months, not until she's done in Toronto, and…"

For a long, terrible, long, painful, _long_ moment, the girl that would not shut up said nothing at all, smiling and shrugging when she was ready to talk again.

"Well…_you_ came. One out of four ain't so bad."

Far be it from him to question someone with an IQ of one-hundred and sixty-eight, but Shinji Ikari felt that Mihiro's math skills leural feedback is negligible good long it takes to run these damn diagnostics oh be patient who knows preliminaries green how many from nodes three chances we'll get four six to three zero three three doft much to be desired.

Ow.

* * *

Ow.

"I can't believe you've never seen _Twilight Seibei_."

"I wasn't even a year old when it came out," Shinji quietly answered Maya. Quietly, because invisible ball-peen hammers had chased him from Sausage Tuesdays. They had caught up to him when they dropped Mihiro off at her lonely, lightless home…house. They had begun tapping out _Baa-Baa Black Sheep_ at a precise spot on his skull -everywhere- when the girl spared them something pleading and accusing before allowing herself to be swallowed up by the unlit hollow.

It was also rare when he was honored by a quality rendition of _Moby Dick_, so he could be forgiven for not doing the sensible thing and declining Ibuki's idea of renting a movie, especially since he had to be up early in the morning…since his head hurt so damned much…

"Are you okay?" It was there in her voice, again, concern beyond concern. It was a little jarring, now that it wasn't over the phone, now that she was looking at him as they stepped over the threshold into his cool apartment. So long as she's not panicking. He associated a panicked Maya Ibuki with an assortment of things, half unpleasant, the other half Asu-

_Stop._

"I just need to sit down for a bit. I'm tired for some reason."

_My head's about to explode for some reason._

The phone on the living room coffee table helped immensely by shrieking at an impossibly high volume. He thought it helped more that the voice on the other end of the line composed a soft, feminine melody…until he realized who it was.

"It…it's great to here from you again, Yukie."

"And you still talk like old people fuck," she murmured, her voice drifting like a dead carp in a poisoned brook, "like _you_ fuck."

"Can this wait? I don't really need to be hearing this, now."

"Ah. Then I won't keep you." Shinji could see her, and those dull dolls eyes -glossed with righteous menace- unveiled with a toss of dark chestnut, her pink lips pursing and parting. "Happy anniversary, faggot."

"But we started dating in March, not-"

Click.

"…June."

"Who was _that_?" It was official; Maya Ibuki was an invective detector. "Was that Mana?"

"No, it-"

"That was Mana, wasn't it?"

"_No_…" Shinji ironed the antagony from his brow, if only to smother the woman's maternal instincts. "Yukie."

"I haven't heard that name in a while."

"I wish I could say the same." He really did. "Can I go wash up or something before we start watching?"

"Take your time. Take a bath." Maya was wandering, unsuccessful in finding a remotely interesting…_thing_…on or near the walls of his criminally unfurnished residence. "Don't worry about me. Nerv starts when I start. My subordinates won't complain."

"Subordinates? I guess you really are in control there..." He weakly chuckled. "You're almost like Ritsuko, now."

"…Go take your bath."

* * *

Shinji stopped trying to move. Innumerable pinpoints of heat pricked and buoyed him beneath the fluid glass, tendrils curling up from it like white smoke. Good. He had been feeling cold and heavy, from weighty shackles that drew around tighter as the night dragged on. It was perhaps this that made him sink further into the furo, until his jaw leveled with liquid crystal ripples. It was the loathsome weight of recurrence.

Ritsuko Akagi's protégé had found reasons to call him in the middle of the night and invite him to lunch, to accompany him to Mihiro's cello recital and…and now they were movie buddies?

It was expectancy. It was strand after strand of hope linked to reciprocity. The symmetry struck him, then, when he considered his friends, those that wished to be more than friends and those that used to be the former or latter. They all…still wanted something from him. Or just him, it was all the same. Mana, Maya, Mihiro, Kensuke, they all hase differential dropping to lower limit theta and smr wave form solutions converged on the eighty fourth iterad a use for him. Yukie still did, in a borderline sadomasochistic way.

Man, she sure did like saying things to him.

Pre and Post Third Impact Shinji Ikari shared that one injurious link, and having once again to stomach third party aspirations would lead to something as ardently appealing now as it was then. Not. That Eva was one of countless artifacts cast down into a world -a reality- five years dead, was entirely moot. Praise and scorn, highs and precipitous lows, could be siphoned from alternative reservoirs banal and preternatural.

Breathing would be harder than letting go and plunging into that familiar, eager dependency. But then, at least, he could be near someone, could form rosaries built up from the morsels of praise they dispensed, even if they injured him, lied to him or muddied him with their disdain. Even if outside their own selfish interests, he was less than nothing. He could be near Mana and-

_-and shut up._

In the end, it was far and away the best thing to not give a god-fucking-damn about their feelings either way. If he was to paramilitary extraterrestrial warfare what Sadaharu Oh was to baseball, then more power to them. If he was an easy mark, ripe for perpetual mockery and good for an occasional cello lesson, it was all good. Well, mostly bad, but again, he tried not to care.

If he was meant to care, then he would not have woken on that white beach roofed by indigo. Alone.

A surge of cold welled within and flooded him to momentarily dispel the bath's cloying heat. Betrayal always felt cold. Never as tired as he suddenly felt, though.

If…_she_…would not return even when he had asked her to, when he had hoped for it and did his best to will her into existence, why was she hounding him? Did she know that this was worse than father, worse than Kaworu?

Worse than Mana? _Stop it_…

Of course. She had been the smartest person he had ever met. Of course she knew.

It had been no more a conscious decision on his part to live as it was to die in this place. Yet, it seemed as if it had been some survival mechanism that made him this way, the way he had been since Asuka had returned, broken, dead, alive. Her _and_ Misato. Ardor for complementation, that was how they had plied him, made him care…and he had finally been delivered from it.

Somewhere along the way to renouncing praise and the contempt which shadowed it -on the way to not needing anyone- self-worth as a relevant measure of his identity found a hole to crawl into, coiled unto itself, and promptly died. That's right. Shinji Ikari found a way to weaponize apathy.

No one would ever again bend him to their will with second-rate palaver. No more ups and downs. The less people he knew, the less chance there was of discovering just how worthless he was. Being nothing to everyone, or everything to no one; Shinji could live with either.

But not if Misato could help it.

"Go to sleep," she said.

Shinji always did what he was told.

* * *

"**_WAKE_ _UP!_**"

* * *

Shinji honestly did not know why he felt embarrassed standing in his apartment, in shorts and a loose-fitting tank top. After all, Maya had seen him decked out in full bathtub birthday suit regalia mere minutes ago. Perhaps it was the fact that the older woman had seen him butt-nekkid so many times during his piloting days they should have been legally married.

Or perhaps it was because when she had lifted his head above the bathwater's surface, she had been shouting and crying hysterically, thus rendering any transgression on his part downright regal by comparison.

Who knew Maya Ibuki had such a powerful set of lungs?

_I do_, he thought, drawing her hair-trigger gaze from across the kitchenette when he loudly coughed.

"I'm _fine_," he said, swallowing. "Just a little water down the wrong pipe. You can relax…please?"

Shinji was looking away before he saw any lax in her hard, scared eyes, more to afford her feminine modesty than anything else. About half the contents of his furo ended up soaking her snug collared blouse to the point of translucency.

"You're lucky you still have a shoji for your bathroom door, you know that?" Her back was to him as she looked down and jabbed at something with a stiff thumb. The phone. "Lucky lucky lucky…"

"I was just tired."

"Uh-huh." What was she doing?

"I'm calling Doctor Ueto." That was Nerv Cranial psychiatric therapist Kiyohiko Ueto. Ibuki pressed the phone to her ear, her other hand frittering at the damp fringe of her white top. She laughed a little. "What time is it? Almost eleven. Sometimes she's still in her office catching up on online publications, something about having dialup at home. _Dialup_. Can you believe that, Shinji?"

"I guess so." He shrugged and watched her shiver. "I don't need to see a therapist, Ma-"

She spun on him, slamming the phone into its receiver with a resounding crack. "WHAT IS _WRONG_ WITH YOU? DON'T TELL ME 'NOTHING'! YOU BETTER NOT SAY IT'S 'NOTHING'!"

"I don't know."

Was that the best answer? The worst? Whatever it was to Maya, it depleted her wellspring of righteous crusader fury and forced her into the nearest seat, where she began to softly cry behind her hands. Shinji had the unsettling impression she was grieving for him. A minute passed before something told the man to move, but she was up by then, pacing and wiping at her wet cheeks. And speaking.

"Shinji…you… _cannot_…_do_ this to people."

"Do _what_ to people?" Her flushed face became twisted by a soft, mocking smile as she stood off a few paces beyond his beige couch. "I don't know what you mean. I haven't done anything to make anyone care-"

"You don't _have_ to do anything!" she snapped. "Don't you get it? People already care!_ I_ care! Kensuke cares! Mihiro cares! _Mana_ cares! Why is giving a damn so hard for you, Shinji? I found you _asleep_. _Underwater_. Doesn't that worry you? Aren't you scared?"

Her inquiry was suspended by a viscous pause thick enough to choke off any vocalization. Not that he could have said anything to temper Maya's brittle edge. Thankfully, it fell away on its own and the young doctor returned to her formal shell with an audible sigh.

He could breathe again. "I'm sorry."

"No, _I'm_ sorry," the short-haired woman intimated, shrinking the space between them with soft steps. "It's not fair to expect you to have all these answers when no one bothered to even ask until now. But did you really think we were going to let you just sink and _die_?"

"They all did before." Maya stopped close enough for him to watch the hope in her eyes die gruesomely. He felt embarrassment again. Of all Nerv people, Maya was perhaps deserving of the least blame, at least less blame than him. He had chosen to pilot, after all. He had chosen to stay. A slave to extolment.

_No more_…

"If," he started, "if you want to help me-"

"Of course. Anything."

"My head is killing me."

"Why can't all your problems be this simple?" she asked, rounding him to reach for something she eyed on his dining room table. A bottle of aspirin that she tried opening.

"Good luck with that. I tried already."

She sniffled, laughing at him. "It's not stuck. It's a childproof cap. You must really be out of it, Shinji. I've had my share of downs, but," She grunted. "but -_shit_- but…it's stuck."

"I told you."

"_Hush_, you." Maya put the white bottle down and looked at him. "You wouldn't happen to have any ginger in here, would you? Or some honey?"

"Second cabin on the right. No, the one above you. That's it. What're you doing?"

"Any alcohol? Something pretty soft."

"Last cabinet on the left."

She scooted over and sure enough, plucked a filmed-over bottle of Pinot-Noir from a spartan shelf. "I have to say…I'm surprised you have this in here, even if it _is_ unopened."

"It's Yukie's actually. She was saving it for something special, just never came back for it."

"Something special," his guest repeated, filling a small pot with faucet water. "Something like, what?"

"_You don't have to say it now. And I won't ask you anymore. Where can I put this?"_

"_Last cabinet on the left."_

"_I love you. Hope you won't keep me waiting too long…"_

"I don't remember," he said.

"Oh," Maya breathed absently, staying busy. "To answer your question, I am making a family remedy to cure headaches. Well, either that or a tea that prevents food poisoning, in which case you'll vomit uncontrollably. I paid pretty good attention to mom, though."

The hammers were back. "_How_ good?"

Squat blue light danced beneath the pot on his white range. "Don't worry, I saw mom make this for me all the time as a girl."

"Wait. Your mother got you drunk when you had headaches?"

Maya turned around long enough to shoot him an admonishing smile. "No!" She turned back around. "A little. Just a tiny bit to help us relax."

"Us? I didn't know you have siblings."

"I don't," she said. "Just a few more minutes…"

* * *

"I'm still not vomiting uncontrollably."

"And I'm still not cleaning up your uncontrollable vomit." Maya looked down past her chest and smiled. "I chose wisely."

"Yeah. I don't think my head's going to explode anymore." Sometime in between downing the hot concoction Maya had cooked up for him and now, his head found its way to her lap, the rest of him stretched out along his plumate couch.

Perhaps _Twilight Seibei_ was a good movie, or perhaps he just felt that way because his brain, mercifully, seemed less detonable.

In the darkness, amidst the sounds of shogunate-era swordplay, something slid across his scalp and then back again. It worked languidly to coax the day's tension from behind his eyes, lading them with fatigue.

"Still not getting why she hates you so much. Yukie."

"Same reason you were yelling at me tonight." Shinji blinked to uproot a germinal seed of sleep. "Also, her boyfriend, the one before me, he died."

Her thigh tensed as she absorbed the information. "That's a pretty big also."

"She was looking for help. Something good. So not me."

He half-expected her to cuff him for saying something so completely self-detracting. That would have been bad, because the fingers that sifted through his brown hair were soft and warm, wholly unlike the cold, calloused digits he imagined them to be. They weren't fingers hardened by years of endlessly typing and taking apart things. Ritsuko's fingers. Maya did not stop, and he settled further into his drowsy haze.

"Was it a car accident? I hate to say it, but lots of young people are getting cancer."

"No." He blinked out of and into consciousness. "Do you remember…the Municipal High School basketball decapitation case-"

"Her boyfriend was _Jin Takashi_?" The pressure from her hand increased ever so slightly. "Oh my God…"

"I couldn't have helped her if I had tried." The collegiate yawned, and it did nothing to ward off a memory of his ex-girlfriend. Of anger. Of that voice, infected with the betrayal he had passed on to her like Ebola. "It's that I didn't try at all. She has every right to hate my guts."

"Not _every_ right, no," Maya said with rigid flatness. "You tell me if she does anything to you, anything dangerous. I'll take care of it."

"Who's Ta-chan?"

The fingers stopped. She breathed and they started again. "I'll put it this way: I don't like to think back on everything that happened before Impact. If ever." The woman's breath rolled in on invisible currents of turbulence. "Sometimes I can stop it, Shinji. Other days…the bad days…they come to me and there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing at all."

His head was thick with sleep but clear of pain. He couldn't decide if the words he heard were Maya's, or lines that his dream spun for her. He looked to a river flowing across the television screen, and he drowned beneath its blue eddies.

"Those bad days…they come and I want to die," she whispered. "That's when I think about Ta-chan. On the good days, I think of Ritsuko."

"Why?" Shinji heard someone ask. Him. "Why Ritsuko?"

"Because it's not my fault she's dead."

"You could never kill anyone, Maya."

"Neither could you. Yet you did."

They were Asuka's fingers and they were laced with Mana's warmth. He could not tell whose lips pressed against his temple.

"Go to sleep, Ta-chan."

Shinji always did what he was told.

* * *

New Fujikyu Highlands was cradled in the cemetery of its abandoned predecessor, in the shadow of its dormant namesake. The park's sinuating steel loops and wooden hills crosscut teeming arterial galleries, their resurrection absolved by the screams of willful captives thundering past lesser venues from the clear blue sky.

Shinji's current line station permitted a view all the way down one the park's brimming arcades. He saw people flow into and out of myriad restaurants –buffets, cafeterias, Meiji-era izayaka, cold-stone ice cream parlors, baseball-themed, American-themed though he didn't know why, seeing as he couldn't go three blocks in Tokyo-3 without walking beneath golden arches.

He saw people, adults smiling patiently as their small children either embraced furry mimic mascots…or ran from them screaming in abject terror. Shinji knew therapy fodder when he saw it. He saw people walk into a restroom, because he had been standing in line for twenty damn minutes and he had to use the restroom.

But mostly, Shinji Ikari saw people, and he was struck by how many there were. Tokyo-3 was a major international metropolis by most standards of wealth, population, tourism or power. But not vitality. For example, Tokyo-3 had no major sports franchises. A bid to co-host the 2024 Olympics with New-Yokohama had been summarily rejected by the IOC, due mostly to non-existent public support. The city, collectively, did not suffer fools. Or fun. Or camaraderie. Or mascosts.

The home of Nerv, the place of The Final Battle, had recovered from its trauma in much the same way someone might recover from a stroke; all of the physical therapy, all of the medical care in the world, would never recoup that which had defined that person and had been lost. Things would never be the same, always diminished.

New Fujikyu Highlands did not simply serve Tokyo-3, however. The park had been revitalized by effort, money, hope and manpower that had flowed down tributaries from all over the Kanto region. The same civil technology that had been employed to afford Kansai International Airport a foundation had raised the sections of the park that had been submerged.

Fujikyu Highlands had risen from reposing depths to buoy the hearts of all those that cherished it, and you could see it on the faces of nearly everyone that ate or laughed, or stood in line for twenty-five minutes godammit how long does it take to get on this coaster it better be the best ride ever.

Minimally, it was one of the most terrifying, as vindicated by a car roaring past the terminal canopy, its occupants crying in…well…terror. After the fourth pass Shinji began guessing what the coaster's name -_Sheissen Antifergen_- meant in German. _New Underwear_, perhaps?

He thanked some ambivalent deity when he and his cohorts were finally herded to the front of the line, and that Mihiro had gone on a few cars ahead of them. This was more than fine with the Third, seeing that the underage girl had taken to yelling, 'NO SHINJI, I WILL _NOT _DO YOU IN NEGATIVE G,' every fifth minute she had been pressed against him in the crush of anticipant riders.

Beyond the channeled throng of park-goers, Chippy the Cinnamon Capybara traipsed down a boulevard, enduring wave after wave of sugar-crazed kindergarteners with aplomb. Shinji did not think it odd Mana chose that moment to squeeze his hand tighter.

"I didn't think you'd get nervous, with your experiences and all."

"I'm not," she answered, peeling her eyes from the giant anthropomorphic rodent as a toddler lovingly hurled herself at the back of his knee.

"It's okay if you are," Shinji gently averred. "I tried seeing the top of this thing and all I got was sun."

"Here…" She quickly lifted his palm to her heart and pressed. "See? I'm not nervous. Are _you_?"

"_Mana_," Hikari hissed from behind them, "there are children _everywhere_-"

"Hey, _he's_ the one that's feeling me up!"

The freckled woman elbowed the freckled man behind her, glowering. "Kensuke! Say something!"

"Like _what_?" he asked as he kneaded a floating rib, "_Score?_"

"How about I came here to have fun, Hikari? Okay? No one's thinking about us, anyway-"

"HEY MISTER! DO HER IN NEGATIVE G!"

The canopy exploded in laughter. A pudgy boy in the back collected high fives.

There was something about being made the object of ridicule for a man in a giant rat suit that made one less saucy, and Mana removed Shinji's hand from her ample bosom.

"I'm gonna get that kid," she grumbled.

* * *

With park employees giving thumbs up to the coaster operator, they glided from the terminal, out into the sun and sound until metal teeth caught above them. Shinji supposed that things would get hectic once they reached the top of the steel lift, so he tried to relax until it got tall and loud.

Then Mana kicked him. "Can we talk?"

He looked to his right, his view of her obscured by her head restraints. "_Now?_"

"We got time." A Fujikyu Highlands golf cart shrank below her dangling legs. "_So_…are you, like, just slowly, passive-aggressively torturing me? Are you revenging me, or…_what_?"

"I don't hurt anyone, Mana-"

"You hurt _me_," he heard her say. "Believe me, you're very, very good at hurting me. And I just want to know if it's because you hate me and you're just too nice to tell me to my face. You can tell me now."

The top of the hill just could not get there fast enough. Were they going backwards? "I don't hate you. I've never…"

"Not even when you found out I had been lying to you? Not when you found out I was a spy, and using you? Not even for one second?"

"I…" Shinji tried shrinking into his seat. "That was so long ago it shouldn't even matter."

"Okay…" His de-facto girlfriend breathed with satisfaction. "Then why didn't you invite me to go to Mihiro's recital?"

How the hell did she know about that? He never recalled tel-_Kensuke_…

"Are you serious? That little…thing? Why would you have wanted to go to _that_?"

"Well, were _you_ there?"

"Yeah, but-"

"Well, there you go. I don't know what's going on with you, but if you're waiting on me to turn into Yukie and just go away…well, good for you that you're a patient guy."

Shinji had been looking at Fuji-san, realizing that they were still going the fuck up, when Mana began dropping names. Why would Kensuke tell her something so perso-_Hikari_…

"I've heard some things about her. I feel for her, about her boyfriend and all, I really do. But she sounds like a punk." Her calf brushed up against his. "Do you think I'm a punk, Shinji?"

"No."

"Do you think that if you sigh enough and lie enough and don't return a certain fraction of my phone calls, I'm just going to give up? That's what you think?"

"No."

"You think that when you smile at me while you reject me, I just go home, close my door and cry all alone, for hours at a time?"

"_No_."

"Well, I do. But that's beside the point. Because I don't have any other choice but to hope that one day we'll be able to understand each other."

He was injected with dreadful nostalgia. "W-what did you just say?"

"I'm saying I can't just go away. And you do _not_ hate me. Did I hear you right?"

"No. I mean, _yes_."

"Then get it together, Ikari." She paused as the other passengers began clamoring. "Please…get it together."

"…how…"

"I love you," she said. "That's how."

He started to scream.

* * *

Hikari was reorganizing her anarchic hairdo. "I think I almost swallowed my tongue back there."

"I think _I_ almost swallowed your tongue," Kensuke muttered, readjusting his glasses and squinting at his former class rep. "Could you have screamed in my ear any louder?"

"I did _not_ scream in your ear!"

"Miss Horaki, please stop screaming," Mihiro pleaded. "And you were all screaming, okay? I heard you pansies all the way down at the station." Grinning, she made her way to the front of their troupe, where Shinji and Mana were walking. "Everyone except my girl here! You didn't make a sound, did you?"

Mana looked down, gave a closed-mouth smile and shook her head.

"That's what I'm talking about!" The girl leapt into Mana for a chest bump. "Yeah! Silent bitches in crime!"

"Um…could you _not_ call my girlfriend a bitch?"

"I'm just _playing_…sorry."

"But you didn't make a sound," Shinji said, appraising the young woman with genuine awe, "I guess you really weren't nervous after all, were you?"

Mana looked at him. She flashed a smile and a 'V' sign. And then she threw up all over his shirt.

* * *

"What was that? Cotton blend? It'll come out. We'll pick up something at one of these souvenir shops."

Shinji planted his elbows on his knees while nodding up at Hikari. There was nothing like sitting shirtless in an amusement park harboring thousands of fully-clothed patrons to remind you how terminally skinny you were. It was not an unhealthy thinness, mind you. It was just that he wasn't going to be winning any Mister Universe competitions anytime soon. Or Mister Japan. Or Mister Kanagawa Prefecture. Or wrestling any fifteen year-olds.

Mana had gone into the restroom to wash her…DNA…out of his shirt while he and the others patiently loitered. No rush. Aside from the pack of teenaged girls standing off from him to mockingly flex their own non-existent guns, he was quite content to sit back and drift off to-

"HEY MISTER! I GUESS NEGATIVE G'S AREN'T FOR EVERYONE, HUH? HA _HA_!"

It seemed as if the heavy-set boy was intent on running that joke into the salted earth. The only problem was-

"that _my_ joke? Did he just steal my joke?" Mihiro pointed out to the boy as she addressed Shinji. "He stole _my_ joke!"

"What do you mean _your_ joke?" The kid bellowed. "I didn't see 'Skeletor' written anywhere on it."

What the hell was a Skeletor? Mihiro knew, if what she said next was any indication. "Look harder, because I sure as hell didn't see 'Fat-Ass' written anywhere on it, either. You joking about gravity's like an American joking about Hiroshima."

"Mihiro…" Hikari breathed, attempting to extinguish the dispute before someone caught on fire and…where did Mihiro get that lighter?

"At least one of us _has_ an ass! Do I give you a training bra or play Go on you?"

Where were this kid's parents?

"_Go_…figures you'd be too busy mouth-fucking horse steaks to learn how to play Chess. I bet if I kicked you in the nuts you'd piss gravy, wouldn't you?"

"That's _disgusting_!" yelled Hikari. "Kensuke, stop laughing!"

"There's only one way to find out, bi-"

It was pretty much on after that.

Shinji could not say exactly when it was he had realized his intervention in the ensuing chaos would have been greatly appreciated. It was, however, sometime after he realized he was too tired to act on the revelation. The sounds of struggling, of kicking, scratching, biting, those things and the biting, he was spiraling away from them all before he even realized there was a drain.

He hid behind his eyes in pitched black fields of tranquility, having bestowed upon him rest he had not known since memories became blood-sopped. There was no blood here. There was no dying here. There was no pain here. Why had it been so difondary procedure begin startup sequence from one module six all nominal from eeg monitor more readings still not chance getting I don't care i'll authorize it if you won't dammit i'll do ifficult to find until now? Because it had not existed until _now_, that was why.

Ow.

His eyes snapped open like dusty blinds as he shot to standing and gagged. He was making sounds, but couldn't sculpt words from them, could not could not could _not_ find things to describe what was happening to him. Shinji staggered away from the bench and rasped with impenetrable urgency, faintly aware of the lull in commotion as his own crisis began taking precedent.

"_Teacher?_" Disheveled, panting and half-restrained by Hikari, Mihiro paused mid-blow to look on him with a fear he did not feel himself.

Kensuke was gauging him, at just as much a lost as to what to do. Just as scared. They were all looking at him, caught between the desire to help and the cold fear brought on by lethal immediacy. Something in his face scared them terribly.

"Are you sick?" Kensuke asked with the perverse hope that was all it was. "What's _wrong_?"

No, he wasn't sick. He just couldn't breathe. His windpipe had been perfectly clear up until a moment ago when, inexplicably, it just wasn't. Some slug of heavy fluid was there, sliding up and down his throat with every attempt he made to take in air. Shinji blinked back spots. He felt his knees slam into the ground as friends and concerned onlookers were spurred into action.

Someone was clasping his shoulders; hands moved up and down and patted his back. Shouting. There was so much shouting. Some three o' clock shadows slid beneath him while others mapped his thin arms. All the liquid was still there, and it was still sanctioning his air supply.

Then, at the point where he felt his culture fall away and the instinct to breathe should have seized his limbs and thrashed them…he relaxed.

Because Shinji Ikari had been here before, had done this before.

The Third Child had done this ten-thousand times…

He was racked with heavy wet hacks as the foul-tasting wash rushed from his trachea, hitting the roof of his mouth before splattering the pavement below. He had not taken a full breath before the shadows and hands raced from him. Sound was lost after a tide of gasps.

Then he saw that it was orange. He scented that it smelled of blood. He knew why the hands had left him. Why Mihiro had started screaming, was still screaming. He knew why shadows drew away. All of them, save for one, which Shinji traced back to black Nikes belonging to shapely legs climbing into beige shorts, up to a heaving torso hidden by a t-shirt. It was dyed deep scarlet, a perfect match for the short hair framing the face lit by a realized nightmare.

Shinji tried to smile it all away, but Mana only clasped her mouth harder, as if her composure would flee her through it.

"I…" He shook with another cough, and his throat was finally clear. "I think I need to see Maya."

End of Chapter 5

A/N: Some slow stuff, some plot progression. Didn't have the heart to leave it out. Chapter six will be more focused. It will have secrets revealed. It will have Rei.

Who just said that?

Random A/N: I should really say something about why it took me a month to complete this chapter, and also why it is nearly twice my average chapter length. But how exciting could being kidnapped by a Bolivian Special Forces-trained cadre of attack chinchillas possibly be? On a related note, this chapter is dedicated to the memory of Commodore Hairy. Never has the spine been ripped out of a braver monkey.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	7. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 6

By MidnightCereal

**Thousands Lost For Words, Time**

Mass Spiriting Away Yields Countless Questions, Few Answers

_By Akemi Ando_

Kanagawa Shimbun Staff Writer

Sunday, July 5, 2020; Page A01

TOKYO-3 – When Hiroki Hamada has last seen his girlfriend, Hana Maruyama, they had been arguing loudly over whose television would sit in the living room of their new apartment.

"It was such a stupid argument at first," he recalled.

It was an argument that had escalated into a shouting match about children, then Hiroshi's parents, and finally ended with Hana storming from their Tokyo-3 flat in tears.

It was an argument that had taken place five years ago.

Hiroki never expected to see her again after Third Impact, an assumption he said was disproved when he, along with 4,000 to 7,000 others, allegedly vanished at approximately 3:16 yesterday afternoon. Hamada claimed to have returned two minutes later with new memories of Hana Maruyama; visions he said were too vivid to simply be dismissed as hallucination.

"I saw Hana right there in front of me," Hamada said. "She didn't just talk to me. She touched my face and she kissed me. And then it was like I fell asleep and woke up at the same time. That's the best I can explain it."

Added Hiroki, "She felt more real (on Saturday) than she ever had. Ever."

That sense of realism is a sentiment shared by many of the absentees, along with detailed accounts of conversations and physical contact with departed loved ones, as well as the sensation of sleeping and waking all at once.

Saturday's alleged disappearances – reported as far north as Shibukawa and as far south as Omaezaki – have not always generated as positive a reaction as Hiroki Hamada's. Kanagawa Prefectural Police and Security Bureau officials alone had received over 1,700 combined emergency calls in a thirty second span minutes into the event.

The negative impact of the purported exodus extended to area hospitals, where patients continue to be admitted, primarily for shock and anxiety-related ailments. The event is being blamed for the death of an elderly Shizuoka man who succumbed following a major heart attack, as well as eleven minor car accidents in Kanagawa Prefecture.

While Kanagawa Governor Daichi Unryuu and neighboring prefectural officials have since called for calm, police, regional security bureau, and CIB investigators have yet offered a public explanation. Several reputable social psychology experts – including Tokyo-3 University's Kazuki Nishimura – have publicly or unofficially hypothesized the cause as mass hysteria.

Numerous mass hysteria occurrences have been historically documented, most notably by philosopher Motoori Norinaga in 1771. More recent examples include epidemic hyperventilation of Old Tokyo railway passengers following the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, and the Phantom Flood of White Day 2009. The only commonality presently associated with the absentees is that their visions consisted of persons lost before or during Third Impact.

As of late Saturday night, over 300 of those claiming to have disappeared have agreed to be interviewed by either local or regional authorities.

**© 2020 Kanagawa Shimbun Group**

* * *

The second hand twisted from one to five above Megumi Sato before she spoke again. Smoke once more curled turbulent up and over her frown to spill out into the dark and empty break room.

"So you read it," she said to her phone.

"I did," he answered, though it hadn't been a question. "Of course I did. It turned out this way because I asked. Why wouldn't I like to see the results?"

"If you're going to insist on talking about this in degrees of 'like', Daichi, expect this to be the last time we talk for about, say, a decade. Can you honestly tell me we have a good twenty years between us?" Megumi's elbow poked the wall at her back. All the while she bored snaggy holes into the First Print Sunday Edition, which suffered in her right fist along with an expertly handled Red Apple cigarette.

Daichi Unryuu sounded complacent, and it was all the forty-six year-old could do to draw another reliable lungful of nicotine.

"It's not about liking or disliking," he explained. "This hardly has anything to do with me, at _all_. It's beyond me, or any of the other Prefectural governors. They're no better off in Gunma or any place there's been disappearances and reporters to cover them. Tokyo-2 was on this like shit on a pig."

"That's not disgusting at all," breathed Megumi, hearing herself in her receiver and bouncing through the fog off an opposite wall.

"Sorry, but that's life for a farm boy. Simple life."

"Some farm boy. I'd say you achieved a pretty good grasp of this city's political inner-workings. All it took was five years, and you knew what to say, when to say it, what to do," she paused, admonishing that artifact in her that lusted after theatre, "how to lie."

He laughed. "Praise from the master?"

"Business and pleasure, Daichi. Not that I get satisfaction from being dishonest. It just has no place at Kanagawa Shimbun, never has. But things are mingling today and it bothers me."

"It really does, doesn't it?" Unryuu asked, and Sato took a moment to hate him and his fake, insulting ignorance.

"There's a new hire here," she began. "Photojournalist. A sophomore at T-3U and she's from the States. The sweetest little thing. But I swear to God she has these…_eyes_. They're this beautiful green and you never look at her, she looks at _you_, finds the lie in you, finds it and then just fucks it to death."

"Sweetest little thing."

"Oh, shut _up_," Megumi barked, spouting tufts of smoke that grasped her phone like grey spirits. "All I'm asking is when she reads this half truth -and she will- what do I say to keep from having my brains screwed out?"

"Maybe nothing, Megu. Or maybe you tell that Yankee girl what it means to take one for the team. And you're making sounds like you don't agree."

"It means what it means, jerk. That there're things that people would _want_ to know, and we're not telling them-"

"Because if we do, there really will be mass hysteria," Daichi finished with authentic gravity. "Please try to remember that I don't think this is some dick-measuring contest. I'm better than that and you know it."

Guilt segued through Megumi and laded her shoulders. Her eyes listed from one side of the sterile box to another, and something about the diffuse bath of vending machine light made her feel old and sad.

"Of course you are," she sighed. "Good enough to know this is all wrong, at least."

Unryuu said, "What we're doing is trading one right for another, on the advice of people that know better than me and you."

"_No_," she seethed, her fatigue instantly vanquished. "They never knew any better. Never. That's why we are where we are and not some place…" Goddamned theatre, "far away. For all we know, this whole thing is they're own damned fault. So at the _least_, they don't know better than the new girl, or my grandfather."

"'Who founded this paper,' said Miss Sato."

"Make fun if you want, but remember that this whole shit storm, Daichi, it's like getting knocked up under his portrait."

Megumi could hear Daichi Unryuu flair his nostrils and blow, a ridiculously histrionic display that usually meant the time for platitudes was very nearly over.

"Fine. Since you're so intent on analogizing sex and degrees of journalistic integrity, you'll be happy to know that most picture frames have two sides; face up and-"

"And _you_ when the Prime Minister snaps his fingers." Grandpa was rolling over like shrimp kabob, and she could do nothing but crush the remnant roll of ash and tar and red embers into a homely ceramic dish. "Face down it is, then."

"Yell at me tonight, Megu. About nine. My house. Amaya and Kaito'll be up from Yaizu. I think you need to have a laugh."

That was true. She was starting to forget what it sounded like. "I'm there. But until then…fuck you, Daichi."

Megumi Sato thumbed a backlit key, and they were once again separated by distance as much as they were by profession and ideology.

The grey handle to the break room door stole the heat from Chief Executive Officer Sato's hand.

"But fuck Nerv more…"

She left.

* * *

"Can I put my shirt back on?"

"Hn?" Maya straightened from the papers splayed out over the stainless steel countertop, twisting to Shinji and snapping back like a torsion spring. "Yeah. Go ahead."

Shinji was sitting and she was standing in an examination room that was small, cold, stocked with sharp metal things with equally long names, and identical to about twenty other suites in Nerv Medical's capacious west wing. The Third Child was fine with all of these things except the temperature, so it was with considerable internal fanfare he tossed his black tee over his head and filled it.

"So…what's wrong with me?"

"Hn?" Maya straightened from the papers splayed out over the stainless steel countertop, twisting to Shinji and snapping back like a torsion spring. "That's a little like wanting the answer to a fourth-order pde without a numerical difference equation solver."

"So…you don't know yet?"

Her back to him, Maya seemed to shrink. "If we're going off the results we're getting, we won't know for a good long while. I…" She paused, and soft white tubes droned above them like restless hornets.

For once, Shinji found himself wishing Maya would spin on her heel and bombard him with facts, a wish he respectfully withdrew when she turned around and looked him in the eye.

"When we got your MRI back, we almost took apart that machine," she told him, "but the Magi ran full diagnostics on it. I'm happy to say we have a fully functioning Magnetic Resonance Imager. TPR Medical Systems should be proud." Her hands swept over her face, her fingertips teasing her hairline as his mind similarly brushed against phantom memories; her fingers on his scalp, soft. Had he imagined that?

"Shinji, there are small…places inside your lungs where your alveoli just aren't there. Like they were just plucked off like grapes. That's why I asked if you were having any breathing problems."

"Hmm."

Maya's eyebrows collapsed. "Is that all you can say? '_Hmm?_" Alveoli oxygenate your blood and get rid of carbon dioxide, Shinji. This could be like Emphysema to you. What if you're not able to breathe at all?"

"Then I'll die."

"_Shinji_-"

"I'm just saying, what do you want me to do about it? Is it a person or an animal? I can't fight it. It…" Sagging as he sat on the stiff examination bed, he kicked his jean-sheathed legs like oars. "It's not an Angel. Maybe it's me. Or my lungs."

The woman seemed to trace his outline with her dour doe's eyes. "Or your brain…"

His face remained placid, patient. Her shoulders rose and fell with a sigh. "Our psychographs kept picking up these anomalies. At first, we didn't know what they were. So I took a look at your EEG, and I separated the composite brainwave, so SMR waves, theta, alpha waves…am I speaking Japanese to you?"

"You're going to say I, what, I have brain damage?"

The young doctor shook her head, and then looked up as if amending her assessment on the fly. "Not in the sense of wave amplitude or frequency, no. But there should be _one_ SMR wave. _One_ theta wave…" Maya looked plainly at him. "Why do you have two of each?"

"How should I know that?"

"I didn't expect you to, it was a _rhetori_…" Maya breathed molasses. "So we can only pick up these ghost waves off and on. They're weak signals, really, two orders magnitude smaller. Until you get tired. When your alpha waves attenuate they're consistent, and the phase difference between those signals and the waves that represent _you_ shrinks…"

She shook her head, "and I have no idea why. Who knows what being disincorporated twice does to a person? I just…I don't know…"

"That's alright," he said gently. "It's not like I was really expecting you to." There was once more sound like an electric hive. He nodded to it before hopping off the bed.

"Where are you going?"

"Mihiro's." Shinji slipped into his socks and shoes, which were huddled under a chair in an antiseptic corner. "It's Tuesday and I tutor her about half an hour from now."

Fingers clasped his arm, and they weren't very soft at all. "Just what in the world are you going to teach her that she won't figure out all on her own in the next week? Next _day_? I want you to tell me what's more important than this."

When he stood at full height and had to look slightly down into her eyes, he suddenly, oddly, felt like a man. If only for a fleeting moment. "Nothing is. But you had a look at me, and you don't know what's wrong. That's all there is to it, isn't it?"

Maya released him, visibly taken aback, and he was once more a boy before her. "Do you_have_ to say things like that? Listen to me, I didn't want you to come here because you felt the need to give me a 'chance'. Come back to this place that was so terrible to you because you want to be _saved_. You want me to keep trying, right?"

He opened his mouth to respond when he thought of the train ride back from Fujikyu Highlands, of the suffocating, quilting silence; of how Mihiro had pinned her knees to her chest and found a nook on Hikari to curl into; of how Kensuke had stared at nothing for seconds and minutes…

Of how Mana's hand had found his and never lost it.

And suddenly, he was very afraid.

"Can…can you?"

Hesitation filled her eyes before she wordlessly reached up and studied his face with a cool, steady hand, fingertips lingering as she pulled it back.

Shinji only blinked at first. "Why did you…?"

"I don't know," Maya confided to the floor. Raising her brown eyes to his questioning frown, the doctor smiled tenuously. "Doctor Akagi didn't teach me everything she knew, but everything I know I learned from her. Hopefully, that'll be enough."

* * *

"Right. Hopefully. When you find out for sure, I'll know where to be."

"You shouldn't be leaving at all, Shinji. I understand not wanting to stay at headquarters, but if you hadn't already been discharged I'd order you to remain here on emergency standby."

"But I was. So you can't."

He left. She just let him leave.

That was the thing about learning from Ritsuko Akagi. You internalized the scientific method. You were immersed in the knowledge, the methodologies of vast disciplines you never knew existed. You mastered the tools at your fingertips so that innumerable fractions, digits, decimals all whirled to a calculated waltz. You coddled your subordinates sometimes, squeezed them others, and you learned whether the first or second was most appropriate.

You learned how to lie and withhold information so as to manipulate situations and suit your own selfish objectives.

She looked down at his psychograph, the image warped by refractions of unshed tears.

"I did it because I was saying goodbye."

* * *

"Are you going to die?"

Shinji did not first realize Mihiro was speaking to him. After all, her music - wordless lyrics, somber, rich and wreathing through tenor chords - had never stopped. Maya was right; he had nothing more to teach Mihiro Kamakura, and he was beginning to wonder if he had ever actually taught her _anything_. If not for the fact that he had the privilege of attending these private slices of string heaven, he'd also be convinced he was wasting his-

"I asked you a question."

"You remember Maya, don't you?"

Her expression remained smooth as glass, eyes shuttered behind static lids. "You're talking about that old lady."

"She's not_that_…yes, her. She's been solving problems like mine her whole career."

There was a shift in her sitting posture. Mihiro opened her eyes, abruptly putting the sonata to its end with a sigh three divorces too worldly. She had been like this the moment she had opened the front door; the young teen had gone through her practiced motions on minimum power alone, not bothering to bound around or crack wise or filthy, not even finding the energy to look him in the eye. Most unlike her.

Or _most_ like her? Perhaps the mask had slipped today.

"What was that piece you just finished?" he asked, unwilling to further dwell on the subject. "I've never heard it before."

"Of course not." She stared down the neck of her instrument and past its bulging spruce bout. "I _did_ just make it up."

"It's beautiful. But it was so sad, though."

"Good."

"To tell the truth, when I imagined you composing your own music it wasn't anything like what you just _are you_ _crying_?"

Shinji was witness to her broken, pitiful huffing, and wondered if someone somewhere was laughing at the fact he was yet again being dragged into a socially awkward situation involving a teenaged girl.

_Not me_, he thought as he crouched before Mihiro, whose hair fanned out over her face as she leaned forward. "If you won't look at me, will you at least listen? I promise I'm not dying any time soon-"

"_No_," she sputtered out, "It's not just that, it's…Shinta broke up with me, _alright_?"

"What?"

Mihiro snapped to him, glaring through a curtain of hair. "YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME SAY IT_TWICE_? HE _DUMPED_ ME! HE SAID I WAS ANNOYING!"

"………………………no…no, you're not…_no_…"

"Well thank you _so much_," she spat. "It's great to know that when life hands me lemons, you'll be right there to squirt me the eye!"

"I-I was only trying to-"

"STOP TRYING. I knew I shoulda told someone else. Someone that can relate, Mister Perfect." She wiped her tears on a short pink sleeve before jumping up to stow away her cello.

"It gets better."

Why did he say that?_Why_ did he say that?

_Why_…did he _say_ that?

It wasn't his place to burden her with that insidious hope. It _never_ gets better.

But Mihiro had already seated herself on the floor in front of him, staring into him with large brown eyes. "How? How do you…did it get better for you? With Mana?"

A shake of the head. "That's not who I mean. I couldn't have been anymore than a year older than you. And Asuka-"

"What'd she look like?"

The moon. A spirit beauty washed white over obsidian, her expression black like the far side, holes in her face from celestial violence, and yoked by scarlet olive branches. She chased you if walked or ran or drove, or if you flew.

"She had red hair. She was German, and-"

"I heard those foreign chicks are crazy, man."

"Yeah, heheh, she-"

"Oh shit, I was just kidding! She was really crazy?"

"_No_. Yes. I don't know. Can I finish a sent-"

"You just did."

"_Mihiro_."

"Sorry."

"You wouldn't have to be sorry if you could be serious for one damned…" Shinji tried to relax, the subject matter pinching, pricking and prodding him all the way. "I'm trying to help you. I'm sorry, but, please, can you try not to be so-"

"_Annoying?_" she finished darkly.

"No, you're not…you think this is easy for me? I don't like talking about her. Or _for_ her."

"Then don't." He blinked at her suggestion, but listened. "C'mon, teacher. Let's role play. I'll be Asuka, your beautiful, barbarian unrequited adolescent love interest…"

"…okay…"

"And you'll be Shinji, the skinny, pervy pizza-faced shut-in with a closet full of sticky Urabon-"

"This is going to be stupid…"

"_Nein!_" Mihiro chided. "Eez zat any vay to talk to your strudel kuchen?"_Gawd_…

"Asuka _didn't_…" He sighed, and reminded himself that in her own special way, Mihiro was trying to help him to help herself. "_You_ didn't talk like that. Your mom was half-Japanese. You just had trouble with kanji."

"So…since I couldn't write you love letters, I'd settle for match after sloppy match of tongue tag in the music room, where you'd show me how to use my 'spit valve'?"

He just stared at Mihiro as if she were some species of deranged goat. "No." He stared some more.

"Didn't write you love letters, didn't _grope_ that which is gropeable…" Mihiro smiled at him. "I wasn't a very affectionate girlfriend, was I?"

"You weren't really my girlfriend, I…" _I can't believe I'm telling you this_, "I just admired you. I thought you could help me because you were the greatest…_thing_ when we met. I thought you were perfect, and, and if you leant a piece of yourself to me…I could be happy."

Her smile leaked a bit of air. "But I didn't make you happy?"

Shinji abandoned a queued-up exposition and sagged. "No."

"But…" she winced once as she sifted through his secrecy, "you made _me_ happy, didn't you?"

He shook his head.

"Because when we talked we realized it just wouldn't work between us?"

"We never really talked about anything important. Or about anything."

"But we got along okay," she ventured," and even though we never really got involved, we-_no_?"

He shrugged.

"Did I even like ONE strand of hair on your big-ass head?"

"I don't know."

"But you'd know when you asked me. So what'd I say when you asked me?"

"…I never asked you." Not until it had been too late.

"Why the hell _not_?"

He grimaced at her, feeling tired. "Because you had your defenses up, Asuka. I couldn't ask you that. I couldn't ask you _anything_. And if you would've given me the chance, you'd have just laughed in my face and told Hikari."

"But…" A flash of desperation arced across her eyebrows, "you never _asked_. Maybe I was scared, or maybe I was a little bitchy-"

He said nothing.

"-but it wouldn't have hurt to take some initiative-"

"_Yes_," he snapped, "it _would_ have. It would've been like dying and there wasn't anything about you that made me think any different. You were a walking fortress and we both knew it. I was _always_ ready, _always_ nice. It was _your_ job to open up, not mine."

"And I never did? Ever? I never gave you any sign or anything at all?"

"I don't know. I mean…" He shook his head as humorless laughter fled him. "I would catch you looking at me out of the corner of my eye. And that time I was in the hospital, when you pretended not to check on me. You…"

He remembered something he couldn't believe he had forgotten. "You _kissed_ me! _You_ kissed _me_, and made this big show about washing your mouth out!"

She looked confused. She had the nerve to look confused. "…so I _did_ like you?"

"I don't know!" he said, not quite talking, not yet shouting. "I don't because you didn't _want_ me to know, Asuka, because you were a hypocrite. Okay? _You_ were the coward. Everything here is sad and _cheap_ because of people like _you_."

"And you."

"And me. You're right. But I never tried to hide it. I never pretended I was better than that when I was just a child myself."

Her rubber band smile grew and shrank and grew, and then she answered. "You know what your problem is? You were fooling yourself. You built up this whole ideal, of what you thought I was, and that wasn't really me."

"That's not true."

"I think you made me out to be some compliment to you, and when you found out I couldn't complete you, you hated me. But I'm not a doll, Shinji. I had my own problems…didn't I?"

"You think you had to go through all of that crap _alone_? _Now_ who's fooling themselves?"

"You are, still. Because when it all comes down to it, I'm not here with you."

"You're not here because you were weak!" he yelled. "You're not here because you'd rather be _dead_!"

"Wait, I'm…she's_dead_?" Mihiro's eyes negotiated with her tan shorts as she fell out of character. "That…then that was rock bottom? And after that-"

"And after that I dated a classmate of mine because she wouldn't take no for an answer. After she finally realized everyone and everything is a _joke_ and you're always the punch line, she punched me. And after she hated me for about two years Mana showed up. Guess what happens next."

Having languished long enough, Mihiro sighed behind her canopy of black bowed willow. "Can we stop, now?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do you mean_what do I mean_? The whole point of this was to cheer my ass up. _It didn't work_."

"It doesn't seem like it now, does it?" he asked, watching her lower lip tremble. "Just wait, wait until the next one. You'll see I did you a favor, and so did Shinta. Now you know what to expect, Mihiro. They're all the same."

"You're full of shit."

"I'm the only person in the world that knows these things are a fact. So you don't believe me." He shrugged. "Fine. But I told you this in the first place because I'm that bad of a liar. You deserve to know the truth, Mihiro, and I wish someone had told me so I didn't have to figure it out all by my…self…"

His words became bottlenecked when Mihiro drew her knees up and hugged them. Somewhere behind those spindly appendages and hair he heard persistent whimpering, which grew in urgency as she rocked forward and back, her shoulders hitching and…and for God's sake, she's only a _puppy_.

"Mihiro…?"

One taste. She had been trying to antagonize him, had succeeded, and he had meant only to give her one small taste of his world to teach her a lesson…and he had poisoned her.

"Forget it. Everything I just said. _Mihiro_?"

He reached over to her forearm, but the girl twisted up and away from him. He stood and approached her as she methodically folded her chair.

And she wouldn't look at him. Or make a sound. He had scared her.

"You have to be so mad at me. And you should be. That was my story and my truth and no one should have to think like I do because it isn't healthy." She was the absence of sound. She was scaring him. "Things got out of control for me, and…and maybe I lost sight. Maybe you're different enough and things will work ougharagarraa_ahhHHH_!"

'OugharagarraaahhHHH', because he had just been cracked in the kneecap with a steel chair.

OugharagarraaahhHHH: When 'Ow' just won't cut it.

No sooner had he toppled over like a drunken stork had Mihiro towered over him, all fire and brimstone, rainbows and lollipops. And steel chairs.

"YOU THINK I NEED YOU TO TELL ME THINGS ARE GOING TO WORK OUT FOR ME?" She took another jagged breath and reloaded. "I ALREADY KNOW I'M NOT GONNA END UP PISSY AND BITTER AND WHIPPED LIKE _YOU_ JUST BECAUSE SHINTA WOULDN'T PUT OUT!"

"You…" He hissed as his knee and the body connected to it throbbed in pain. "You were trying to get in his pants?"

"NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, JERK! LIKE I'D EVER LET YOU DWELL ON _MY_ PAST!"

The girl was out of breath, presumably from all the screaming at the top of her lungs until she was out of breath.

"And you know what else? You are not a _bad_ liar. _Dad_ is a bad liar. _Shinta_ is a bad liar. _You_. Are the worst. _Liar.._."

And then the long, loud moment had passed.

No it hadn't.

"_EVAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!_"

There was something about having a thirteen year-old scream piercingly a centimeter from your cochlea that made you deaf. Percussion thrummed through Shinji like some slapdash ensemble, but he was able to make out her concussive stomping, diminishing and then punctuated by a resounding slam someplace above him.

The young man that was Shinji Ikari decided no one would mind terribly if he lay there for another few minutes or weeks, however long it took for him to regain his equilibrium and the feeling in his left foot. Maybe he would not mind so much if something good offset the…the owies. Something told him -his brain, perhaps- that the good feeling thing was not here. Nothing, no one here would hold his hand…

"Class dismissed."

* * *

Maya was sitting in the darkness and worshipping at the altar of a glowing digital god. She prayed in her executive chair, head bowed in penance, her hands laced on top her crown like a knotted headscarf. This splendid deity's glory shown forth from a box brimming with baptizing white, and Maya bathed in it while repenting wordlessly.

Absolution: It came all too slowly for the woman. So her head bowed lower. Her fingers bleached as she laced them tighter. Maya prayed harder. She had to, so as to adequately compensate for her meager devotional.

**Shinji,**

**This is not **

No, confession was the most appropriate descriptor. It was a request for forgiveness made requisite by her deadly sin of silence. If anyone was still around to read it, it would speak for her and that was all it _could_ do, since saving her soul was out of the…

A synthetic hymn. An intruder, someone somewhere some_why_. People in places with reasons chopstick flimsy and as significant as a speck on the lens of a telescope.

Thank God.

"Crazy," she heard Doctor Ueto say. "Everyone. Is _crazy_. Until this Saturday, my phone only rang on the hook. None of my patients knew my nickname was Kiki." She pulled air past her teeth. "An hour ago, a young cadet -whose dead mother nagged her about her short skirt- passed all the way out in my lunch."

"That sounds, uh, saturated. Late lunch, too."

"That's the thing," said Kiyohiko. "I didn't actually get to eat it. So you realize how nuts I am, don't you, asking for another patient?"

"Who?"

The woman sighed. "Your phone call from Saturday, Maya. I'm returning it."

Ibuki could not help but wonder if her friend could discern feigned ignorance over the phone. "_Ohhhh_…oh. Thanks, but it's all going to work itself out. It was a friend."

"I see. And this friend wouldn't happen to work at Nerv, would she?"

"Weren't you the one telling me you've memorized detailed psychological profiles on all upper level staff? You should already know whether or not I'm going crazy."

"Maybe." Maya imagined Doctor Ueto typing something up on her Hi-Def monitor. Something about her. "But the dossier's only part of the story. I_hate_ novellas."

"Too bad my friend -and she's a he, by the way- is going to come to a resolution all on his own, then. The guy's a walking epic. Don't think I'd want to live his story, though."

Doctor Ueto made a sound that was not quite a chuckle. "I think we should leave the prognostics to the Magi, don't you?"

"I _am_ the Magi." Her eyes flickered to the screen:

**Shinji,**

**This is not **

"But thanks for worrying."

"Everyone here is so_scared_. Or happy. Or angry. It's like being in that soup, again. I can't help but worry."

"You might as well," said Maya. "Get it out of your system. My guess is that in a few days you won't feel a thing."

"Perfectly perfect desensitization, huh?" She could see Kiyohiko nodding to herself contemplatively. "Bye bye, Maya."

"Bye bye, Kiki."

Well, that had been a pleasant diversion. Now back to feeling like a manipulative, backstabbing traitor. Back to feeling like Ritsuko; Shinji was on to something. But he wouldn't be around for any I-told-you-so's.

So why write anything to him? The shortest -and most correct answer- was that she was writing for herself. At least, she was trying to-

And it came to her, a rising tide of truth to inundate deception; she was worshipping the wrong god.

Maya stood and stretched past textbook towers, drawing a thin notepad past hardcover sentinels. She pushed her keyboard to the side to make space for it, then found a pen to fill the stationery's own blank space. The woman touched the wet black tip to the paper, allowing herself a small selfish smile after the first full sentence.

Amen.

* * *

Mana hid her surprise quickly, projecting calm as she leaned easily against her apartment doorframe and squinted happily at him. "Now, Shinji, how am I going to bite you if you're standing all the way out in the hallway?"

Hmm…now _that_ was an oddly pleasing image. "I don't…but why would you want to bite…"

"Just get your dumb ass in here," she sighed, rolling away from the entrance to grant him passage.

He obliged and stepped through, sensing their aloneness. "Where's Hikari?"

"Nanny work." Mana hefted a basket of clean clothes onto her couch. "Surprised she hasn't choked the little beasts, yet. Don't tell her I said that." She found him, a drop of light in a sea of darkness. "You didn't come out here to see _her_, I hope?"

"No."

"Then what does bring you to Uyeda Undergraduate Hills Apartment Complex, Building Six, Room 204?"

"Well…" He paused as Mana busied herself like a nesting robin. "I visited Maya today. She wanted to run more tests, but I left after I depressed her. I made Mihiro cry. So now I'm here and…" He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I'm going for the trifecta."

"So you're going to make me cry again?" Mana asked somewhere behind him.

The young man said, "No. I…I just wanted to see you. But the way things are going today, I'll probably have done something to you by the time I go back home."

"Let's hope so." Her voice was suddenly at his ear, and she seemed to be all around him as she brushed past. The woman must have felt him tense, because she smiled so weakly as to nearly frown. "What did you mean by 'more tests'?"

"It means I'm fine and Maya's just being thorough, like always."

"Or that something is really wrong and she just doesn't know what."

"Could be."

"You're not at a place with 'could be's'. Either there _is_ a problem or there isn't, and I doubt she'd let you leave unless you had a good answer." Now Mana really was frowning. She shook her head of scarlet hair while sitting on the arm of her couch. "Do me this favor and pretend, just for a second, that I'm not Mihiro. Just do that and I won't keep things from you. I don't remember it ever being this hard for you to be fair."

The Third kept his eyes trained somewhere just below her chest. "I'm not worried about you keeping things from me," he said, truly believing it. "I told you before, all the stuff that happened, it's not important."

She reached around a couch cushion, picked something up and flung it at his head.

"And that's why it_is_ important, dummy!" He grinned weakly at the laugh in her voice, staring down at her fluffy projectile -a pair of white socks. "It's important because it isn't. You know what I mean?"

"I know," he lied.

"Now we can talk about all those things because we know it won't change _us_. It should be _nothing_, Shinji, like telling stories. Aren't you the least bit curious? I am."

He brushed off Mana's antiquated reasoning. Perhaps she was fine with telling 'stories' about _her_ past, but Shinji Ikari did not have stories. He had cautionary tales. He had Greek tragedies. Some of them seemed not quite over.

"Come on…" she gently coaxed, "what do you want to know? About my parents? About Trident? How I almost lost my foot? My…" she leaned forward and lowered her voice, "my first? You want to know about Souichi?"

She sat back up when he made his 'too much information' face.

"Sorry…just putting it out there…" Mana laughed sheepishly then stopped and tilted her head, holding him with an innocent gaze as she folded a clean pair of pants. "Are you a virgin?"

"No." He wasn't. Yukie had seen to that.

Mana lifted a red shirt to her lap and folded that, too. She brandished sympathetic eyes. "It's okay. I mean, you're quiet and you don't initiate a lot of talk…or touch." She might have paused briefly. "And you're alone all the time and you're…alone. It's okay."

"Okay…but I'm not."

She might have growled briefly. "_Fine_," she snapped, fitfully gathering up her laundry.

"What?"

"_Nothing_."

"Then why are you angry?"

"I'm not angry!" she said angrily. "I'll be back. I made some lemonade. Just try not to choke."

_I will never understand females_, he silently lamented while Mana stomped down a back corridor. _Not girls, not teenaged girls, not women. Not ever_.

Mana couldn't have been that upset. She had offered liquid refreshment, and even expressed some desire not to see him die because of it.

Ikari retrieved the pitcher from a crowded refrigerator shelf, poured and sipped and choked. How much sugar did she put in this? Good God, he was dating a fly. Oh well. He drank again because diabetes was overrated. Perhaps sugar shock would lift him up when so many things in this place pushed him down.

Bathed by early evening sun, Mana and Hikari's residency shown full and radiant, a starkly mocking contrast to his own place, which was a glorified funeral parlor (Yukie contended it was the other way around). The two women had managed to stock their home with a kaleidoscope of vibrant memories, florid colors and noises.

It was saturated with manifold mellifluous smells. A medley of aromatic orchids held gentle sovereignty over their small living room. As Shinji wandered past the kitchenette, faint but insistent scents confronted him. He could taste the champon. His own place often smelled of food, as he cooked his own meals more often than not…and ate them alone more often than not…more often than more often. The smell of dinner, knowing you had someone to share it with, it was like comparing sex to…this place just smelled like life.

_Their_ lives. Not his.

Never, ever his.

He couldn't let Mana see the piece of him sadness had found and gleefully crushed. She had been looking so hard.

Like him, right now.

He was seeing something pinned by a refrigerator magnet shaped like a penguin. It was a picture, and some _thing_ about it -in it- grabbed him. It began stripping him…of heat, sound, air and with it those full smells he loved so much that he hated them. And then it ripped hate from him as though it were a kite in a typhoon's grey maelstrom. He was not strong enough to hold onto anything, or feel or think, just stare.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared.

And he stared at it before pinching it between cold fingers -he could feel cold- and turning to shamble down the back hallway, slowly, dazed. Shinji could feel his mind forming word shapes, placing letters, punctuations and pictures, ideas one after another, all shaped by some cardinal design.

_God God God_, he thought, and he did not know why.

The door knob for Mana's room was cold, too. However, the space behind it was warm and white, and she was a blotch of snow and peach topped off by a shock of bouncy red. Shinji managed to focus by the time she drew herself up, looked back at him and smiled gently, questioningly.

So he questioned her.

"How do you know Kaworu Nagisa?"

"I…" Mana tossed a pair of panties on her bed. She blinked once and again. "Who?"

"_Him_." He advanced on her with unthinking, primal urgency, and held the photograph a quivering inch from her ashing face. "_HIM!_"

He watched every expressive thing on her twist from the worst confusion and fear, feeling no sympathy. He just wanted an answer. Just _once_, he was going to have answers…

"That's Souichi," she whispered. A leaky laugh as if he had punctured her, a terrible, sick plea. "_Souichi_. You…are you jealous?"

A million fingers touched him everywhere, touched everything. They made him think, which was making him sick.

"_Answer_ _me_," she demanded, color and righteousness flooding her. "I can't ever understand you if you don't talk to – where the hell do you think you're _going_?"

_Away, Mana. Away from here._

"Don't run away from me. Not from _me_. _Please_."

_Away from you_.

"Shinji? Shinji Ikari, I am _talking_ to you."

_Away from HIM_.

"GET BACK HERE AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF JUST ONCE! _ONCE_, YOU FUCKING COWARD!"

She caught his arm at the landing for the front door. He tried snatching it back but she hung fast like a Bullmastiff.

"Oh no. _No_. You're not leaving until you start talking and don't stop until you make sense."

"I'm not the one that needs to explain anything!" he shouted, finally looking on Mana with wide, wild eyes. "How can I make sense when no one else does? Nothing is right in this place! _Nothing!_ People don't even stay dead when I _kill_ them!"

She paled again, her fingers digging into his skin. "You _killed_ my ex-boyfriend?"

"He was _not_ your _boyfriend_!" He pulled again and she tugged again. "I…I crushed him! He was the last damn Angel and I _saw_ his head pop off and you're _posing_ with him!"

"…you're scaring me."

They were small words, but they reached him, tamed him. Something delirious broke out on her face. She made a sound, weak and disbelieving. "This is so…I'm not laughing at _you_, just the situation…I was ready for anything but-"

Her shoulders shook again before she composed herself and continued. "Okay…let's play this game. Souichi Nakajima isn't a real person. Okay. He's some, some alias for this _Nagisa_, or whatever the hell his name is. Prove it, Shinji. Make me a believer, or I'm just going to laugh again," her grip tightened almost imperceptibly, "and you're going to join me."

Shinji knew he had already lost. As always, he knew nothing. He had nothing. Just a picture. Hell, the boy in the exposure had brown eyes and black hair. Shinji just had a feeling and that face and smile that had been seared into him, a memory brand black and flaking.

But there _was_ a reason Asuka invaded and shredded his peace; why Misato would put him to sleep to drown him; why he coughed up primordial soup; why Maya thought he had two damn brains. Those items and this boy who had Kaworu's face and grin, whom Mana was cheek-to-cheek with, all added to a sum he was too small to calculate.

So he lost.

"What's the matter?" A smile slid across her features, oil-slick. "Not going to say anything? Then I will. I _knew_ Souichi Nakajima. He never let me down or left me alone or lied to me. He was a little obtuse, but he never really hid a single piece of himself. He treated me as if he'd been born just to meet me, like I deserved every bit of the empathy he ever had. I'm saying he loved me, Shinji."

Mana looked at him and softened, somehow mistaking his vindication as her own.

"_Love_. Can your aliens do that? Can your monsters do that? He's the best kind of angel. He's the best…person I've ever met. And he's the only reason I'm talking to you right now." She slowly rubbed his arm. But she wouldn't shut up. She would not stop damning herself.

"And besides, he, he_liked_ things! He had favorite foods, favorite clothes and TV shows. Favorite music -he loved _Ode_ _to_ _Joy_-_loved_ it. He liked the beach, he…"

And the most important of truths filled her eyes at once, snatching the air out of her. The woman's fingers fled from him, curling over her mouth as she gasped.

"…he liked the beach. We went…went to New Goza because he loved the _seashore_…oh_no_…" He watched as Mana allowed a wall to support her. She searched the ceiling, the floor, the living room, the ceiling, never finding what she was looking for.

But she did not look at him. She would not face him. That was what made up his mind.

He moved to put on his shoes.

"How…how could I know that?" she asked from behind him. "How could I know? _How?_ Why'd I react the way I just did? If I knew, would I just leave pictures of him out for you to find? Would I do that?"

He didn't answer as her voice came closer. "Shinji? Why would I let him kiss me? And put his hands on me? W-why would I let him…" He heard her choke up as he reached for the door. "I _didn't know_. Why would I lie?"

"Because you're…you."

There was a moment when he could not tell a living person flanked him. It wasn't just the absence of speech or breath. Mana had simply stopped existing for a quantifiable period of time.

Then a force viced his shoulder and spun him.

She was smiling, an impossibly cherubic visage. It nailed him place, and he would have believed her had her eyes not been so wet. She should stop smiling.

"What's that mean?" Her voice was rusted by the wetness. "'Because I'm me.' What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing."

"_No_." She shook her head, laughing and crying softly, and it was terrible. "_Not_ nothing. It's _not_. You said it, so you should know what you_meant_. You should know _me_. So what am I going to do next, Shinji?"

He could smell the lemonade on her breath, she was so close. Crying and getting closer.

God, she shouldn't laugh. She shouldn't be so angry while she adjoined their chests and stomachs and pelvises, while she made him feel her fluttering heart through her pressed flesh and thin tank top. Her tears became his, smeared across his cheek from hers. No. Not like this. _Please_._Stop_.

But she didn't, because velvet was at his ear. "What happens next? Hn? What do I do now, because I'm _me_?"

_Nothing_, he wanted to say, _because by leaving here I'll have killed Kaworu for good. Betrayal and false hope would die again_.

Shinji couldn't leave. Not with Mana kissing him like that.

He almost didn't feel the door at his back, because everything that was _not_ Mana became irrelevant. The world reduced to the warmth covering him, the hands clutching the back of his foggy head, the other tongue in his mouth, expertly slipping, curling and licking inside. Only when it ran along the roof of his mouth did he try kissing her back, but she was having none of it. He conceded the run of him and she used it to deny all his initiative while externalities bleached in her light.

What had he been doing? Why had he been trying to leave a minute, two, now three minutes ago? That very good reason was whispering in a chorus of barbarous screams, feeling like tree bark while wearing winter gloves. The points of firm skin poking his ribs were much more tactile. He knew what they felt like, _had_ felt them, erect and supple in his palm while waiting in line at Fujikyu Highlands.

She let him feel. She_made_ him feel, it had been so long, she had been so patient and had suffered him, and he had nearly slammed her own door in her face. God. _God_, he was going to slip into her and never come out…

It was love. She _was_ love. He understood, finally, that she was an unremitting, tender force of nature. He had been fooling himself by thinking he could leave her, because she was not a person in a finite place. She was everything, all the time, and everywhere.

She had hunted him mercifully, a pack of one and all, and just happened to finally consume him in this apartment, taking away from him while giving back just as much. She was everything Asuka was trying to be. He had tried to turn his back on her, for _some_ stupid reason.

It must have been stupid, whatever it was, because as Mana Kirishima pulled back, as his lower lip slipped from between hers like pulled taffy, he was certain that had been, without a doubt, the most loving thing anyone had ever done for-

"Get out."

The wherewithal to formulate questions failed Shinji. He just blinked at her trembling smile as his lungs malfunctioned. Mana's worked just fine.

"**GET. _OUT!_**"

* * *

And he did. He just…got out.

Spent, she had waded back to her room on rubbery legs before the front door had even closed. She had listed to a wall kind enough to hold her up.

She was sitting on her bed, now. Her elbows and knees formed a tripod with her brow and palms as she leaned forward.

She was quiet, just breathing. Not crying, not laughing or shaking - she was not a broken toy in a child's hand. Just sitting.

Then she was staring past her knees, between her bare feet. Something there was not crying or laughing, either.

But it was staring. And it was-

"Stop. _Smiling_."

* * *

At first, Mihiro thought she imagined the sounds. She was, like always, the only thing in her house that could make sounds, _had_ been the only thing since teacher, presumably, limped out. Steel chairs were made of steel.

All one had to do was ask any Swahili-tongued Antimatter Shuttlecock or Razorbacked Armenian Jungle Cow, and they would likely tell you Mihiro Kamakura had a wonderfully active imagination. They would then proceed to devour you with their gamma mouths.

The girl could still discern reality and imagination, at least for now, so her head dipped back between her knees as she sat and sulked on the floor. Her bed frame was hard against her spine but was ignored, as were the ribbons of warmth that came through her window, mapping her arms with Tuesday's amber dusk, burning her-

Well, not really_burning_, because the sun's peak radiant power flux was a little more than a thousand watts per square meter at sea level, and even if it were assumed that Japanese skin did not have intermediate eumelanin levels -and it certainly did- burning only began at around forty-five degrees Celsius. Shit.

She was doing it again. Not intentionally. Would do this _voluntarily_?

That was why she sometimes hated learning new things. She was a walking, breathing critical information threshold, where the understanding of an equation, a law of nature, a musical composition, and the sexual practices of the Emishi came to her, satellites captured in the gravity of a LBV-class star. Sometimes, times like now, the understanding was too great, the knowledge too small, and it would veer into her like an airburst above Tunguska in Siberia, Russia, at approximately 7:17 AM on June 30, 1908. _Shit_.

All of the trivia she had amassed like so much dreck, she'd give it all up to know someone's heart. The _one_ thing you couldn't find in a book. Or on the internet. She knew. She had actually tried. Lord, Allah, Vishnu, Yahweh, Flying Spaghetti Monster, they all knew she had tried. It was the one knowledge that filled glasses half-empty_and_ half-full, and Mihiro did not understand. The irony didn't escape her. Of course it didn't. Nothing escaped her except for that one thing. That happened to be ironic also and why wouldn't it cut _off_?

Because she needed a person to cut it off, someone to distract and put up with her while she filled the space between their ears to empty her own. That was the problem, wasn't it? No one wanted to listen to her. Not anymore. She was not the conference call at three on Sunday afternoon. She was _annoying_. She couldn't be serious for one damned…second? Minute? Vighati?

Teacher -that compassionately cruel man- had been right.

She was born alone. She would die alone. And somewhere in between, the most she would ever be to some fool's gold of a pretty boy was a story recounted to pacify a whimpering thirteen year-old. Bullshit. The universe had answers stacked up like rice in a silo…and someone saw fit to put 'genuine fidelity' all the way at the bottom. _Mega Ultra Bullshit-chan_.

And she hated rice as much as she hated crying. Both came all too easy, the latter coming_now_, gentle moonlit waves on a midnight beach. Mihiro found it odd she could not cry harder; no one was here to hold over her head those dollar store platitudes about how her problems were nothing compared to those of the real world.

Then what was making that noise?

Kamakura turned the wave machine off and stood. It got louder as she approached the door, and it wasn't noise. It was music. Mihiro opened the door, and she realized it was beautiful music, floating up from the first floor.

Teacher did not play the viola, to her knowledge. Dad didn't play any instruments. Besides, he was at work. He was _always_ at work. Shinta, quite simply, wouldn't know a viola if she had rammed one all the way up his…he didn't have a key -he wouldn't take _anything_ from her.

Mihiro descended noiselessly, now intensely hoping the instrumentalist was a woman. It was widely believed the Municipal High School Butcher was. Perhaps her, then?

This new person was in the study room Mihiro had used as she wrung every last second of companionship from her instructor. She was sitting in Mihiro's folding chair with text-book posture as her bow cut back and across her viola's c-bouts. Finely-tuned alabaster fingers curled over the wooden neck, dipping and rescinding to anoint each string with tenor lyricism. Her eyes closed, the intruder was oblivious to her intruder. She was a she. Fourteen years-old. Or fifteen, or seventeen; the white face and thin body were somehow free of…age.

Mihiro found herself clapping before she consciously acknowledged the stoppage in play. The older girl or young woman's face split with a brief, serviceable smile, as if she had been ordered to do so, before slipping back into easy neutrality. Kamakura eagerly returned the gesture as her eyes washed over the face framed with…Jesus, that wasn't a dye job.

"You mind if I'm straight with you?" said Mihiro, stepping into the room. "You kinda _look_ like a psychopath."

"Then you wish me to leave?" She had the voice of a ghost. The look and voice were pale like a copy of a copy of a copy. Yet, if she was not really here, why would she be asking if she should leave?

"No…" Mihiro shook her head as she stood before her guest. "You're the only one that can tell me why you're here. You can't go. I don't even know your name, yet."

"I am the words 'I love you', cast by the Other as final messenger."

"Yeah, I used to know a Rei," Mihiro kicked a heel before flopping to the carpet, "but she never had eyes like yours."

"I hate my eyes," Rei said, shuttering once more as Kamakura gave a delighted gasp.

"Hey, _I_ hate things, too! We're practically sisters. We sit in _chairs_, we play string _instruments_, neither of us has a _chest_, we…" They both attended Tokyo-3 Junior High. Administrators possessed of infinite wisdom -or at least fashion sense- had changed uniforms just in time for her freshmen year, but she knew that garish cyan fuku anywhere.

Had Rei transferred? Was she a graduate? In any case, why was she still wearing it?

She should ask Rei. About where she's from and why she's in her house. _How_ she's in her house, because Limpy McKari always locked the front door behind him. What did Rei intend to do? All of these were valid and exceedingly fair questions, none of which Mihiro felt exceedingly compelled to vocalize.

"What was that you were just playing?"

"I don't know." Rei swept the floor with a frigid glance; neither Shuttlecocks nor Jungle Cows could imagine red eyes ever being so cold. "I played only what I had been ordered to."

"Oh. Well, since I have no idea what the hell you're really talking about, I'll just go ahead and assume you made it up, like me." Harsh light filled Mihiro's mind in that instant, painting its every corner with some screaming, quintessential instinct. And she ignored it.

She was just so tired of being alone. In the end, that made more sense than anything else.

"Do you think you could play it again?"

"Of course," this time, Rei's smile came with canny trim, "for the reason that this song is yours and no one else's."

That scream in her head again, it was stifled by the first chord and it died on the second. Mihiro could hear the viola and nothing else, a sonorous cascade like sound colors, rich crimsons, blues and greens that composed an aural spectrum. _Her_ spectrum.

It really was her song, and Mihiro could do nothing but close her eyes and allow it to fill her, to drown the child's sorrow that choked her when she thought of hating father or touching Shinta or kissing teacher. That adolescent despair drifted away in the swift currents of each successive sound phrase, swirling down to a place with her eyes, her mouth, her tongue and feet and fingers. The whole of her was found again before realizing she had even been lost.

Before she even knew to scream.

She heard vibrant, resonating melancholia. She could feel it where her chin and the viola met. Her viola. Of course it was hers. It was her song, after all, as much her property as her fingers, delicate and dancing like spider's legs on shimmering threads; her elbow, sweeping through arcs punctuated by shifting melody; her buttocks, warmed in the folding chair by the wait for her to come downstairs, so that she could _begin_ and _listen_ and _end_ it all…

So she lowered the long bow and the instrument it coaxed sound out of, placing them on the floor as she rose from her seat. She walked out of the room, pausing at the front door just long enough to slip into her shoes.

And then she left to end it all.

End of Chapter 6

A/N:

MC: That was a pretty good guess, sean!

(Closes door and locks it)

MC: I didn't know at first if I should go ahead and make that connection, but it began making sense to me in the long run.

(Disconnects phone)

MC: To be honest, I was waiting for someone to bring it up, and when no one had mentioned it to me, I began to worry a bit.

(Turns off lights)

MC: It was a difficult balance. I didn't want to make it too obvious who So actually was. Maybe it was obvious to other people. I don't know…

(Shuts blinds)

MC: But if I didn't leave enough clues in previous chapters, the revelation would just feel like some super cheap Deus ex, you know what I mean? Just like some people thought it was obvious, perhaps others _did_ think it was cheap.

(Puts on black gloves)

MC: Hopefully, now it'll make a bit more sense why I had those scenes with So interacting with Mana, and why he had directed Hikari to take the other bus home.

(Turns on stereo full blast)

MC: Or maybe not. There are a lot of things about this story that I want to be better. But I'll leave that bit of perfectionism to my next story, which will be a one shot. I want that to be truly publishable. Ambitious? Unrealistic? Maybe. Probably. No hurt in trying, though.

(Gets out spool of wire)

MC: You know what really worried me about this chapter? The fact that I promised Rei Ayanami, and she only showed up within the last thousand or so words of a ten-thousand word chapter. But hey, the story was never really about her. She's the most popular bit player in the world, but a bit player nonetheless. She served her purpose, and I just hope I characterized her fairly.

(Pulls wire taught over hands)

MC: Now…what other secrets do you know about?

Random A/N: You know I'm just playing, right, sean? Thank you and everyone else for the feedback.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

Next Chapter: The Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

Yes. I know that 'somewhy' isn't a word.


	8. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: The Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

By MidnightCereal

His refrigerator hummed approvingly.

Why was that? To Shinji's knowledge, all he had done was sit at his apartment's dining room table, helpless as the darkness and the moon's light tirelessly quarreled. They were a stalwart and righteous pair, each entirely used to having things entirely their way. As the young man could attest, coexistence was a bitch, for which -if the tempestuous hag persisted- the whelming shadows and the ethereal glow eventually compromised.

He could see, then, reluctant silhouettes, the edges of blue-black surfaces salvaging wayward luminescence as though it were cast away from a sunken ship of light. It was just enough to see his small dinner table stretch to his left and right and in front of him.

And the person sitting across, a still shape doused indigo.

Nevertheless, Shinji could trace thin arms and round shoulders up to long hair - long because it was likelier they had two necks than one that was that thick. He filled with hawkish queries, and was surprised that when the refrigerator ceased to hum approvingly that answers lost their fear and emerged.

A sharp crack between him and the blue-coated woman (it was probably a woman, with the long hair and all) was followed by an interminable hiss, a sighing snake.

Or the breath of God, transcendent heat that thawed the blue arms until they were infused with grainy ashy grey shifting into white, chameleon-quick. It diffused all along the biceps, down to forearms laid flat against the table, soaking the wrists and fingers wrapped around a small glinting cylinder. The whiteness ran up to the shoulders as well, an alabaster current streaming beneath the strap of a tank-top bridge. It shot down her chest -it _was_ a woman- and up her neck, injected into her slender jaw…and it was Misato.

He opened his mouth to make her alive, but she beat him to it, the marble in her eyes shining as she opened them and peered across.

"Hope you don't mind," she said, apology coloring her voice as she blinked down to her Yebisu. A smile tugged at the mouth flushing weakly with what might have been spray paint peach. "I know I'm not supposed to have these things in here. Or…at _all_."

Misato took the smile off. "But it's…you. You know? And I know that's no real excuse for not coming to see you for all this time. But I really did need another reason, and I finally got it. Asuka acts like she doesn't understand."

When the woman looked up this time, his vision had adjusted enough to make out a ghost of color in her irises; earthen brown washed with moisture, and for a moment he could see the flash of hatred in them.

"But she always does that, acts like you're insulting her if you assume she doesn't know every damned thing. Until there's something she doesn't _want_ to know. She thinks she has a monopoly on _pain_ or something."

The former pilot watched bankrupt hues spill over and fill her with frail pastels.

"And…and I guess that's just it. It's that it hurts, that's it. You…hurt. And before, that was such a bad thing that I just couldn't come here, anymore. Couldn't take it. It's worth it, now. At this moment, right now, it's worth being hurt by you. I want to feel as bad, as low as possible."

He tried extrapolating something vivid, spreading as she spoke; it was a rich violet, blossoming just below Misato's pale breasts. It had more color, more life than anything he could see. It was growing.

She ignored it, taking a modest sip from her beer.

"And no, you don't have to tell me how you get when I pile all my shitty hopes and dreams on you, because if there's anyone that knows, she's speaking to you. I know better than Asuka. No matter _what_ she says."

It was growing, like spilled red wine on a linen table cloth. She ignored it.

"But that's what's going to make this wonderful." She sounded as if she were going to be a mommy. "Sometimes I forget how hard it was for you, because they had to do so _much_ before you finally gave up."

It was the strain in her voice, like fatigued steel, that pulled his gaze up from the living stain and back to her eyes, now spilling over with tears.

"But no one's doing a thing to you now, are they? So this should be _so easy_, like breathing, and I'm counting on it. Because…" Her composure failed her and she nearly choked on her words. "Because if this doesn't work I don't know _what_ I'll do!"

And before Shinji could figure out how to ask what it was that would or wouldn't work, before he realized the heartache carving up her face had been scoured, Misato had slumped forward, face down.

Uncompromising silence fell upon her.

His eyes ran past the hands still wrapped loosely around the beer can, before stopping at the tresses tumbling over her arms and the face he knew he did not want to see. The spray paint pastels seeped back into whatever reservoir they had first issued forth, abandoning her to a pixilated grey and powdered milk winter.

Abandoning her to the stain.

There was an execrable, cancerous voracity to the way it clambered. It never would slow, would it? It would dye her shirt, and perhaps hesitate briefly, gauging, before leaping onto her dead skin like a river overwhelming its shallow bank. It would color the nape of her neck, her collar, and the piece of spine peaking between the hem of her shirt and the top of her sweat pants. All of her, and then she'd be lost to it.

He would lose her again and they would never do the rest.

His hand was rising from his lap, autonomous and dark against the whiteness of the form stretched out across the table except for the mark like an ink well conquering her.

Touch her and wake her up. Touch her and give life to whatever hope she clung to by shaking her alive and washing that malignancy off of her. He was craning over her, hovering, realizing it was blood beneath the cosmetic quick fix of perfume, balking at the copper-coin taste of it. Touch her, and she'd have no good reason to bleed or smell like the end of all things.

Touch her.

But then a voice of polite, feminine, and unapologetic plasticity said, _Hakone-Yumoto Station. Tokyo-3 University. Hakone Garden Museum. This is the Orange Line to Gora_.

Shinji was awake the first moment, alert the second, and abandoning the dream on the window seat as the third moment closed off with a two-tone chime. Sick of violet, he ignored the peek-a-boo twilight shuffling between the train station's concrete columns, and sifted past unfamiliar faces, a dozen shades of indifference.

He was halfway to ground level when the voice reminded him with genuine artificial concern, _Railway passengers; please make sure to have all of your personal belongings in your possession before exiting the train_.

He gave a grease-film smile.

He could never forget anything now, not ever.

Shinji Ikari would never be allowed to leave anything behind.

* * *

"_Hello, I'm Hikari Horaki, class representative."_

"_Hi, I'm Mana Kirishima, thousand miles an hour."_

Eh. It had been funnier when they were freshmen. And drunk.

Hikari stood in her apartment with arms folded, stalwart amidst a blur she was fairly certain was her roommate. Her hunch would be validated every few minutes when the dervish would stop flipping pillows, cracking open the fridge, and turning on the kitchen faucet. Kirishima would be sporting another essential article of clothing, in complete ignorance of how difficult it actually was to look thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply angry all at once - pulling it off with spectacular ease. She'd then spin back to her room as something occurred to her, and say:

"Shit."

Mana, being a rubber band, almost never swore. You'd pull at her, you would watch her get thinner and longer and thinner, right before she snapped back to make an attempt on your eye-

"Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit." Mana paused. "Shit."

"At least try and call first," said Hikari. "You don't even know where he is."

Mana didn't look at her, just tucked a carmine lock behind her ear as she mined the space behind a couch cushion. She allowed herself a brief, triumphant smile when she produced a set of keys.

The smile vanished, and Hikari said, "I was listening, heard every word you said, and you're right. He was wrong. You could've hit him over the head with a chair and I would've understood."

The woman with burnt umber hair poured a glass of water, put on her last shoe, drank a glass of water, tied her last shoe, and cinched the last button of her flower-print blouse. Because none of these things were complemented by half a syllable of a single word, Hikari tried the direct approach.

"I don't think you should see him anymore."

Kirishima stopped and restarted. "His phone was busy. He said he'd be going home." She unfastened the shirt buttons with impatient idiot fingers. "And I know he was wrong. I know he _deserved_ it. I didn't hit him with a chair because these are all _your_ chairs in here and you'd notice if there was blood all over the woodwork."

The de-facto Horaki matriarch nodded. "I would have. Forget him."

Mana looked down at her shirt, satisfied she had dressed herself like a big girl, before looking at Hikari. "But you know bludgeoning him might've been better? Better than what I did? It's so easy, hurting him, it's…" She shook her head, walked over to a power outlet in the living room and unplugged her cell phone.

"But listen," Hikari flatly offered, "he lied to you. He said…you _told_ me he didn't care about what happened when you were all kids and he_lied_-"

"Because he thought _I_ was lying." The chemist thumbed a key on her phone before pocketing it in her dark blue jeans. Hikari watched Mana's shoulders rise and fall, pins-and-needles nervous.

"I mean, can you just think for a sec about how all this played out in front of him? Tell me you would've reacted…well, not different…_better_. He doesn't have all the facts, Hikari." A hostile entity overwhelmed Mana. "_Souichi_ does."

"Why are you making excuses for him?"

Kirishima gave a laugh. A warning. "You know…just because you call it an excuse doesn't mean it's not someone else's fault. So you can stop trying to convince me it's not worth working this out. You know he's not some ordinary jerk."

"I know that. He's the special kind. The kind that doesn't even try."

Mana froze.

"He's my friend," breathed Hikari, force-fed empathy like curdled milk on her tongue. "He _is_. He doesn't, doesn't _mean_ any of this, and I don't blame him, but…but he will kill you if you let him-"

"JUST WHAT IS _WITH_ YOU TOKYO-3 PEOPLE? WHY DON'T ANY OF YOU HAVE A GODDAMN FAITH?"

Mana's steel-blue eyes were already filling with shame, an apology surging from her, too late. Hikari knew she had sounded cold, and still hadn't been able to bleach the stain of that blemish from her demeanor.

It had been found; that black vestige of mottled hatred, reptilian fear and old love like glass shards shifting beneath scarred pink skin. Every cold, dormant thing from _that_ time ignited and expanded, purging her of a sob muffled in Mana's shoulder.

"I didn't mean that," Kirishima lied. "Not to get at you." Oh.

Mana's chest expanded against hers, and the former spy pulled back.

"I don't know what…maybe I'm just jealous," the brunette managed after a calming breath. "You have all this conviction and…I don't know…"

"It _is_ my conviction, isn't it?" Mana slipped by Hikari to make her way to the front door. "I know that just like I know I love Shinji. Just like I knew that So would never ever lie or hide anything from me…and there you go."

Hikari stood, a living shadow painted on the dying day beyond the patio, as her roommate patted herself down to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. When Mana reached for the knob, she looked back; Hikari Horaki would recall seeing nothing but fear.

"Hikari…what am I doing here?"

She was gone.

She was gone and it was all Shinji's fault. It was and it wasn't.

* * *

Sayyadiah, as delicious as Kensuke Aida decided it was, would never again be as interesting as it was now. This was because in observing Shinji Ikari, the spectacled man could see in his mind's myopic eye a man or woman, and the day they invented the word _acheronian_…right before they drowned themselves in the nearest open sewer.

Shallow-fried fish with rice was impossibly fascinating. Yes.

Kensuke sat in Mimi's Café across from the man impersonating a cadaver impersonating a sac of wet rice, and decided to get this over with.

"So you blew it, huh?"

"Yeah."

"So she's pissed, huh?"

"Yeah."

Aida pushed his meal underneath the condemned's forehead. "D'you want some? I'll go get an extra fork, or some chopsticks."

Shinji's head yawed. "I don't think I should eat anything, right now."

Kensuke agreed. He had no desire to see what sayyadiah looked like coming back up. At least not for free. The young security agent frowned, floating a sullen glance to the red clay walls before docking at the only other restaurateurs; two young women sitting beneath a cone of light at a side booth. Kensuke looked them off when one of them frowned back.

"I…all I can offer is food, Ikari. You think if I had phone numbers just lying around for dozens of beautiful girls I'd be working for Nerv?"

Shinji pulled himself up from his misery bog long enough to raise an eyebrow.

"Okay, yeah," Aida conceded, "that came out a little pimpish. But you know what I'm talking about because, well, you never let me see you like this, anymore." He gave a guilty shrug in his shirt and tie. "You know you messed up a sure thing that's not computer-related. I can't troubleshoot this."

"Kensuke…" The corner of Ikari's mouth coiled up and in on itself in a writhing spiral, more worm than smile, "if you had the power to fix my problem, you'd be part of it."

"Part of what?" the glassed man asked, but fringe curiosity wanted to know why the frowning young lady was boring smoldering coal holes in the side of Shinji's bowed head.

The former Child took no notice, saying, "That's something you have to ask Mana about. Better yet, ask Souichi. Ask him why he won't leave me alone."

"So that's what all this is? This guy's been bothering you?"

"He's _not_ a_guy_ at _all_." Then Shinji leaned forward and told him.

Fan blades churned above them, spectral whorls whipping around pistils of light. The Mediterranean styling of Amr Diab belted over the gentle snoring of a busboy slacking in the corner. The woman stared and frowned.

"Are you shittin' me?" asked Kensuke. "_Are you shittin' me?_ I gotta abso-fucking-lutely believe you are shitting all _over_ me."

"No. I'm not." Shinji looked at him. "I'd know him anywhere, no matter what he looked like. And it was him."

Kensuke Aida the Man had long since been exposed to the air of the real world, finding it polluted with sicknesses that choked people with things like…it was fear.

The last Angel. Alive. That wasn't totally awesome. That wasn't fantastic. Just fantastically terrifying.

Aida sighed. "You think Maya's going to love this? I mean, it isn't like she's busy enough with the disappearances and-"

"Why would she have anything to do with any of that?" Shinji interjected, bothering to look as confused as Kensuke felt.

"Why wouldn't she? What, you saw her today and she didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"_God_, Shinji…" Seeing that the two women had occupied themselves with a civil disagreement, Kensuke felt secure in ducking forward and whispering. "Those people? They didn't _vanish_, okay? No one, _no __one_ just logged off and respawned. They _melted_. Ikari, they melted into LCL. And some of them haven't come back."

"But," Shinji struggled to reconcile something behind his darting blue eyes, "but the Daily said that it wasn't known-"

"_Forget_ the stupid paper," Kensuke hissed. "What happens if this gets out? What do _you_ think? Would there be a party?"

"…are you asking_me_?"

"Shinji, you got to get your head…" Kensuke cupped his face, exhaling slowly, and then pulled his hands back to wipe away the frustration beneath. "Go see Maya. You can explain all this much better than me."

"I never want to have enough information to be able to explain all this."

"Then just go to her and open your mouth and start saying things," pressed Kensuke. "Between this and all the missing people and Asuka she might be able to see the forest…uh…in the, the forest of trees, or some shit like that."

Relief waged pitched battle with dread in the pit of Kensuke's stomach when Shinji managed genuine shock. "She…Maya knows, _knew_? About Asuka? You told her?"

Kensuke fell from the stupefied tree, hitting every branch on the way down. "Of _course_ I told her! You're killing me! She sucked a _pint_ of blood out of your ass today, she was looking at pictures of your _brain_…and she never mentioned she _knew_?"

The Third Child merely shook his head, staring slack-jawed and dumbfounded.

Dread won, and Kensuke sat back heavily with fitfully folded arms. "I don't like this, man. I didn't sign up with Nerv just so even _more_ secrets could be kept from me."

"You signed up with Nerv," intoned Shinji, and that was all he said, and they grew quiet.

Until.

"You still look cute when you're down in the dumps."

Someone not named Kensuke or Shinji had said that, had reached them and straddled the chair next to Ikari's, her forearms cream-colored cake layers topping the metal backrest. The woman had first looked just as sweet, and it was a moment before Kensuke realized she had been the one frowning from the booth, her charcoal eyes fluctuating between something not as sweet as cake, and perhaps cake that had been laced with ricin.

"I'm fine, Yukie," Shinji mumbled, his own gaze never surfacing.

Aida thought of harp seals (when harp seals still existed) bobbing like fat grey corks through watering holes in the arctic ice (when the arctic still existed), only when they felt the need to breathe or have their faces ripped off by a polar bear, the last of which could be found in the 'Ghosts of the Great White North' exhibit at the Como Park Zoo in Minnesota.

This was all to say that Yukie had creepy black eyes like a polar bear's, or that she was really some predator, or that Shinji looked as if he were to come up for air, the girl would rip his face off and send it to Minnesota. Something like that.

But the long, luxuriously dark-haired Yukie just smiled at Shinji's temple. It was a wide, empty smile that hid her teeth and never touched those disaffected eyes she probably stole from some poor shark, while her friend watched on from the booth, bracing herself for the inevitable…

Oh.

"I want to tell you what I did today." Yukie (_Utsumi_, from class 2-A) paused, reaching out to pick lint off his black sleeve, touching him and never really touching him. "I took a test. See, City College has a good program for English, but, well, it's like some of the prerequisites are just this busywork bullshit." She smiled at Kensuke. "Sorry for the language."

Kensuke said nothing. She expected nothing and turned back to her ex-boyfriend. "So it was pretty easy, an essay at the end and somehow I wrote a page and a half about interpunction. _Interpunction_, I mean…_huh_? Then I went back home, had some soba Aki made-"

The other woman frowned disapprovingly when Yukie twisted around and waved.

"I went and ran a bit," she continued in her rosewater timbre, "I pulled up lame after about a kilometer, so I walked back to my place. Showered." Her lips were tweaked by a fond memory as she leaned close, canting to his eye level. "Remember, Shinji? When we took _showers_ together? How good did _that_ feel? Good enough to wish it wouldn't end, right? Good enough to make you wish you didn't _blow __it_-"

"He's had, like, two years to get over it," Kensuke said to her, "and so did you."

She pulled herself up and scanned the freckles on the Nerv rookie's face. "I thought you looked familiar! Mixed-match volleyball for the sports festival, remember Kensuke?" Her laughter was as brutal as a mother's lullaby. "_Now fuck off_."

"No, he's right," Aki interjected, "Ikari's not doing anything to you-"

"HE'LL ALWAYS DO SOMETHING TO _ME_."

In the ensuing quiet, Kensuke could have sworn someone said, "Not _again_." Exactly what the young man in glasses was thinking.

And it would go on like this. Yukie would circle above him, swooping down periodically to pick at him until she had her fill and flapped away in a storm of oily rainbows on feathery black prisms. Belly full of hatred, laughter rotting in her gullet. And Shinji Ikari would do nothing, because Shinji Ikari was dead.

His friend was dead.

"So I was showering," Yukie reiterated. "Finished up and watched the news. That thing about people just disappearing?" She shook her head solemnly. "It_is_ crap. Amazing what you hear when your roommate's sister writes for the Daily."

Those black pearls swiveled to Kensuke. "How about it, Nerv boy? It sounds like you'd know something about this. That's why you _signed up_, right?"

"I _get_ it," said Kensuke, "you have good ears."

Yukie shrugged. "Men can't whisper. You just _can't_. And when shit goes down here, it's usually Nerv's fault. Me and Aki just think good food gets your mind off bad things, you know, Shinji?" The color of her voice shifted, the shade of fire. "_And you're here_."

Kensuke saw something flicker across the dead man's face, life like a flint spark, but warped and strange and not Shinji Ikari.

Utsumi didn't notice as she went in for the kill. "But you know the thing about my day, what makes all the stuff I did amazing?" Shinji didn't say anything. "It didn't happen. None of it did. I made it all up, except for us being here, obviously. Actually…I was in my room and I saw this commercial that ruined my day, because it was about wine and it reminded me of you, which in turn reminded me of how much I wish you were dead. And that Jin wasn't. That's it."

"I could die for you."

Yukie recovered first, seemingly unfazed by Shinji's offer to…he had offered to _cease existing_, and all she did was wag a finger at him, a mother admonishing a disobedient son.

"Who do you think you're talking to? I'm not here for equivalency, Shinji, because to expect that much from you is to court disappointment. So I'll settle for honesty, for knowing who hurt you and I want you to tell me exactly _how_ they did it. Every little detail." She did touch him this time, fingers sweeping over his lap. "Make me happy. For once."

Shinji was a flat, inert thing in one moment, and in the next he resurfaced, towing along with him a shipwrecked smile, the worst Kensuke had ever seen.

"Honesty…" Ikari tasted the word, turned to look his ex-girlfriend in the eye, and imbibed. "Fine. Yukie, every time we were…_together_, I pretended that you were Asuka. Every single time. Are you happy, now?"

There was stunned silence in the same way Fat Man had been a big bomb. Yukie blinked, looked down then back up, and softly said, "I'm going to kill you."

She let him draw close, and then nearer, her eyes fluttering closed as he stood and kissed her lips. Shinji pulled up and away while Yukie silently admired the sickness carved like a great wave in his wooden face.

"I would've whispered," Shinji told her, "but I mean, you said it yourself."

Utsumi did not answer, simply sat, staring -waiting for a bus whose route looped within the terracotta walls- as Shinji walked out and merged into the evening's sidewalk traffic. The bus was late.

"Let's go home," Kensuke heard Aki say. "Yukie, please? Talk to me when we get home-"

Yukie stood and raked fingers through her brunette roots as though coming to terms with an irrefutable truth, pushing it through her skull to hasten her acceptance of it.

And she too was out the door.

Aki watched Kensuke watch Aki. "Don't worry," she said, looking and sounding worried. "The worst she's ever done to him is splash him with vegetable oil, and it wasn't even all that hot."

She fiddled nervously with a spoon. "I can't ever remember Shinji provoking her, though…but trust me, Aida, at the most she'll do something that'll wear off in a few days."

"Oh…" he mouthed. "Okay…as long as we don't have to chase after them."

"Agreed."

Kensuke slid his plate back over to his side of the table. For him, the only consolation for the last five minutes or so was that his food had come out of it in…tact…

"Where's my fork?"

* * *

The night was new and the pavement brimmed.

Shinji's death row gait slowed as he went against a grain of parasite singles, but more and more by the thought of what had just occurred.

The Third Child had done what he did best when the world worked to break him; he went away, and so could hardly be held responsible when everything died, wept, choked beneath the tutelage of his savage understudy. Yukie drove into him those tainted daggers, had inadvertently jutted into that reservoir from which he had drank so deeply. He had huddled beneath the warmth of its familiarity.

Shinji had been kind enough to bring her close and smash her like Touji, like Asuka, like_Enemy_. The least she could do was kill him.

Shinji slowed down.

"Why are your legs so damn long? You're not even all that tall."

He shrugged. "Don't ask me, Mihiro. Ask my father. He's who I _God_!" Shinji composed himself and looked down at his side. Mihiro took long strides and blithely smiled back. "What…what're you doing here?"

The girl took the moment they were separated by a passing salary man to assemble a thought. "I'm walking next to you is what…what I'm doing here. Thinking how I'm going to say and present what I have to say and present. Filching forks."

"What?"

"_Forks_, Ikari." She produced one, examining its greasy silver prongs. "Twirl it, poke it, _stab_ it. She was gonna fork you from behind. Couldn't have that, now could we?"

Kamakura stopped walking, turned and grinned smugly at Yukie Utsumi…who stood off a stride's length, scowling at her palm as though she were about to scold it for being empty.

Mihiro raised the utensil while ignoring the glares from displaced pedestrians. "Looking for this?"

"_How did you_…" Yukie started, but anger surged forth and so did she, snatching the girl's wrist and a fistful of her pink shirt. Shinji looked on helplessly, passerbies stupidly. "Give it back, you little shit! It's mine!"

"No, this is…" said Mihiro, and she laughed. He would remember her laughing. Then raising her free hand and extending a little pinkie up to the forehead of Yukie Utsumi.

Who predictably exploded in a fine orange mist.

Someone saw and screamed, just like the man next to her, and the woman behind him who shouldered a young couple fleeing, who had probably also seen along with the mother whose children shrieked from confusion and pain when an escaping man knocked them to the ground which sounded with a thousand singular swarms of chaos, marrying and swelling like the dust soaked with hollers and hearsay and herding thunder drummed out by the hooves of men.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Shinji Ikari was beached by shock on an island of tranquility. The world moved around Mihiro Kamakura, and soon he faced her, knowing that she was the eye of blood at the center of the storm…

He joined everyone else.

* * *

The walls of the recording booth were adeptly padded with pyramidic foam teeth, perforating heretic sounds from the outside world between the thighs of a phonophobic iron maiden.

But Souichi Nakajima heard something, anyway.

"You're zoning out a bit," a woman called behind him. "If you wanna call it a day, just say when."

He turned away from the nothing no one could hear with a smile that said he completely knew her. "But you haven't finished recording. Only my heart breaks, never my promises. We'll stop when you want to stop."

"You can't be real," she chuckled. "Anyway, if you only knew how hard it is to find a good pianist, nowadays, and one that works for _free_ is just…you are a godsend."

He laughed. "I prefer deliverer, one who is vigilant and hears all cries for help."

"Dude, there were, like, six muggings last week. You heard _my_ cry for a cheap musician over all that?"

"They didn't have an ad in the paper."

Her mouth slanted with a teasing smirk. "But you heard something just now, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Okay then, _Clark_," she mused, believing it a game and playing at it, "shouldn't you be finding a phone booth or making up some stupid excuse to leave?"

"Soon," he said, walking to her, "but as of now, it is just you and I."

* * *

Shinji was alone, the safest thing he could be. A minute previously he had collapsed into the safest place, a wreck of jagged breaths, sticky with sweat and a blood-scented coat of what seemed a liter of premium Yukie Utsumi; enough of her to fuel his flight home.

It mattered little that the oil of commingled sounds and sights from his panicked dash had been skimmed off the surface of his mind. Shinji didn't want to remember anything from the past fifteen minutes. So he sat alone in the dark, wishing only to starve the embers dining on the oxygen in his lungs.

Wishing, as he leaned against the heat sink he called a front door, that Mihiro Kamakura would stay as far, far away as inhumanly possible as she said, "What? So I don't even get a, 'Oh, Miss Kamakura, may I just say how positively messianic you're looking tonight'? No wonder Asuka didn't come back."

Her small black-on-black form squatted at his side, and he could tell she was cupping her chin in upturned palms. He could feel her looking at him, that she was reaching out to touch him…

"GET AWAY FROM ME!" He scuttled further into the darkness.

"Ikari, let's get real," she chided, scoffing in exasperation or amusement or both. "All running from me does is get you tired. You still got some Yukie on you, that's all."

Shinji grasped the edge of something, pulled himself to his feet, gasping. "She's…Yukie,_she_," he sputtered, breath choppy in the wake of sorrow, "she's all _over_…"

Yukie Utsumi was all over. He wept for her.

"Yeah, I know, I know," Mihiro sighed. Her non-empathy drew near to him. "Boohoo. Sob. Because you two had such an excellent rapport. But I didn't kill her. She just had no respect for personal space, so I took hers. Now she is suspended in the glass between this place and the place that mirrors it. She's a refugee without a homeland. She is _totally screwed_."

Whatever she had become, Mihiro Kamakura still made footsteps, from which the distraught man blindly retreated. "Don't do this to me," he pleaded.

"Oh, how easy would_that_ have been?" she rhetorically asked. "That's the thing about removing parasites from their hosts. Or hosts from their parasites? Whatever. The point is that you have to want the parasite removed. _You_, Ikari, it all has to be _your_ choice. Otherwise, we really would just end up killing you."

"WHAT HAS TO BE MY CHOICE? WHAT?"

"Asking questions?" She sounded pleased. "Good sign. First step is always the most important. Because _now_ I am allowed to show you-"

"Don't you touch me! _Don't touch me!_"

"What makes you think you have anything to fear from my magic fingers?" Her child's tone filled with placating things, he discerned her thin arms sweeping out, offering up to him an embrace and a terrible unknown. "I _won't_ turn you into goo. How good of a salesman would I be if I lost my only customer?"

"No means no, sweetie," said a woman.

There was a click as the world revealed itself at the price of sixty flickering watts, and Shinji and Mihiro turned. In response to the question written all over their faces in ninety-point italic font, Mana smiled out at them from the kitchenette with a shrug. "Hey, I _was_ a spy."

Mihiro faced him, puzzled. "Why do you even bother to lock your door?"

"Because he's sick of people forcing themselves on him, right, Shinji?" Mana paused as she joined them in his threadbare living room with careful footsteps, standing off from Mihiro and pointing as if the girl were a witch. "She doesn't understand that. No matter _what_ she says."

"You don't even know why I'm here," Mihiro condescended, her innocence all but vanquished.

"I don't need to. I didn't hear you come in, you're trying to touch my boyfriend, and for some reason he's scared to death of you."

The being faced Mana fully, and Shinji finally saw the danger of the situation reflected in the woman's sobering eyes; Mihiro Kamakura was terribly amiss.

The image came to him unbidden. Yukie's face like the swollen rubber of a bloated water balloon, ruptured and racing from Mihiro's pinkie as though it were a needle, and then hot sheets of amber erupting from the broken membrane, wild like liquid flames. It froze him.

Then the thing said to Mana, "He has to be as afraid of me as he is of you. I wouldn't have come out here if we just wanted him killed, because he already would've drowned in his bathtub. Or choked in the park, lungless. It really is a complex reaction. His death in this falsehood is only the catalyst."

"I've had my fill of this," Mana flatly declared. "Get the hell away from him. We're done with you assholes and we don't want whatever it is you're selling. Do you understand?"

Mihiro impersonated herself: "You're talking to someone who writes haiku in binary. Of course I understand." She laughed a performer's laugh. "You silly woman. There is no away for me. I am always-"

There was no space between her and Mana.

"-here."

Kirishima was stuck in the past, still reconciling the face in front of her that had been paces off during the last moment anything made sense. In the now, Mihiro shot a palm to Mana's forehead while Shinji loosed a silent scream.

Mana cried out, lashed out, catching the grasping girl with a sloppy right cross and it had to be some trick of light, because Mihiro seemed to have barely reacted. Mana pulled her fist back as if from a muddy bog, chopping at the girl's outstretched arm, and this time he _saw_…

The woman was trapped. Mana's hands were lodged inside the teenager's forearm as her fingers poked through the other side of the appendage, storm-splintered wood stock ventilating tree trunk. And they were all bloodless, seamless wounds. A perfect fusion.

A bear trap.

Mana tried jerking away from the absurdity she found herself arrested by. Wide-eyed panic swam into her, its alchemy transmuting every resolute thing on her face into blind fear; it all did nothing to Mihiro, holding fast as the woman let out pleading sounds.

Her back to him, Mihiro was saying, "I know you had your heart set on showing me up and marking your territory, Mana. But I'm just a little tired of men telling me 'no' today. He's not yours, anymore."

He was snatching the heavy clubbed base of a lamp and hurling himself towards the thing in the Mihiro mask. He jetted past the memory of trains, keening air raid sirens, shelters with people packing bento and hording despair. Then flitting by calamitous memories, crushing memories smeared into a paste of blood, meat, offal. Past the words from someone wise and dead, watering melons.

"_No one is forcing you…"_

An exhausted vision, gasping with hands on its knobby knees, and when that memory collected and unfolded itself, it was the pilot of Unit-01, Shinji Ikari.

_He_ was not allowed to lose.

"_No one is forcing you…"_

Mana peered out from beneath Mihiro's planted palm and over the girl's shoulder, the plea etched in her pained, tear-streaked visage for and against-

"_Oh no, sweet little Mihiro! Someone came in here and bashed your head in with-"_

The brass base blurred through a crescent sweeping down to the black hair haloed by a saw-toothed sheen of light. And still she faced away, inviting murder and a new bloodstain on his art smock conscience.

He was the pilot of Unit-01, Shinji Ikari.

He was not allowed to be clean.

**NOT ALLOWED•**

The world's thunder exploded in his head, its lightning in his cobalt eyes. Its power smashed him across the room, where a wall waited to steal his breath and any sense of orientation. He was a heap on the floor, ears ringing with high-pitched aria and distant shouting. Breathing shot blooms of pain into his stomach and he curled around it, toppling over like a bald tire. He hadn't been allowed.

Mana had been the one shouting, was still shouting, shackled and spitting, crazed with hope and dismay. He saw its back was still to him, and between them the shivering plain of light fostered by the thing's aggregated soul. He saw and knew he could do nothing.

Mana was still fighting. The hand on her twitched and she stopped.

"I really wish," it said conversationally, "that I had the power to synthesize Prozac. I'm serious, relax. She wanted to give me a piece of her mind, and now I'm curious."

The child's hand pushed forward like pressing concrete, like molding clay, like treading water. Mana's cerulean pools watched him, the light of fear in them fading along with everything else…

"…_if you're waiting on me to turn into Yukie and just go away…"_

There was a terrible shriek of pain, a volatile splash…

"…_well, good for you that you're a patient guy."_

Mana was not there, and he had forever, now.

Mihiro clutched the hand that took his reason away, held it to her body, a wounded bird. She was changing, and when she turned haltingly to look on him he knew she was shuddering at the onset of humanity reclaimed.

"Wha…w-what was _in_ her?" she asked, her fingers flexing. He had forever to lie on the floor, to starve, to atrophy. "It was like…in my mind and touching…it was _like_…"

The girl was hurt, frightened, on the verge of tears, and he did not think to console her. Shinji couldn't think of anything. He watched her creeping to him, not really seeing anything.

"Why aren't you saying something? I didn't mean to do that to…I just felt something biting me and it _happened_, Ikari, it just happened and I'm _sorry_."

She knelt, her folded legs floating through his glaze of surrender, total and mute-

"Say something! I-I can't help unless you say it's _okay_. I was…" A frustrated sob, trickling from a fissure in her lips. "I was trying to help…teacher…say something."

"I want to die."

Mihiro joined him in defeat, growing sullen and quiet. A moment passed them by before a small hand rose from her lap, its shadow swinging over him. A warm, pristine palm mapped his temple.

She felt like mother.

"I wish that wasn't the second step," she told him.

And there was the sensation of having his brain pulled through the side of his sk

* * *

"Go_dammit_…"

Maya Ibuki heard, stopped writing, stopped breathing, and stopped praying for forgiveness. The plastic in her chair squeaked laboriously as she spun around, her shadow larger and fuzzier than life on a far denim wall.

There was something shifting between her and her flat-screen projection, dark and beautiful.

"Is…" Maya paused to lick her parched lips, "is Ritsuko with you?"

"Eh, she's around," Kenta muttered. He wiped fussily at a mark below one of his drowsy eyes. "Oneesan, you don't have any witch hazel or anything in here, do you?"

Laughter, abrupt and buoyant, bubbled up from inside her as she stood. "_Witch__hazel?_ Ta-chan, do I look like I'm fifty?"

"When you squint."

"Ass." His jibe, every wonderful thing about his sloppy face tugged at the corner of her lips as she neared him. "But you wouldn't need any disinfectant if you stopped giving that Tanaka boy a reason to bust your lip."

"He wouldn't have a reason to bust my lip if he'd just leave Haruka alone."

"Well, maybe he'd leave Haruka alone if she wasn't such a slut."

"Well, maybe she wouldn't be such a slut if…I hate you, Maya."

The twelve year-old in her stuck her tongue out. "That's too bad, Ta-chan. Because I love you." She discreetly licked her thumb, looking him in his large brown eyes. "Now move your hand. Let me see…"

She touched him. It wasn't such a bad cut.

* * *

ull. When it died away, Mihiro was gone and the world had righted itself. However, the moment he had picked himself up off the floor, entered the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid, had been surgically removed from his concussed memory. The file that included when and why he replaced his washiki squatter in favor of a western-style john had also been corrupted.

And yet here he was, sitting, trying to determine who would have reason to bang on his door like a drum major's drunken, jealous brother. He wondered when he had replaced his shoji with something hinged and able to withstand a misplaced hand or a bad day.

And just who was Mihiro? The name and face were hazy ships distant and wedged in the crease of his mind's horizon. He'd come back to it later, as the need to explain his current station pressed him with a random staccato generator.

Then a breakthrough: What if the person thumping on his bathroom door did so because it was actually _their_ bathroom door, and more pointedly, their bathroom door belonged to _their_ bathroom? This would make this a place other than his apartment which, when the young man tried envisioning, merrily fluctuated between a scrupulously over-furnished sanctuary, and a glorified funeral parlor. Which residence was actually his?

Whose home was this?

Shinji was unlocking the door before he realized he was standing and walking over and unlocking the door.

Belligerence stormed past him.

"What the hell were you _doing_ in here, cooking opium?"

Belligerence, as it were, was only a few centimeters shorter than him, berated him with an incredibly light but distinct and tightly controlled accent, and was arrayed in silken auburn which cascaded down to her shoulder blades.

Belligerence pierced him with expectant eyes of royal blue, and he knew he would never see anyone as beautiful again, and also that somehow that wasn't true, but he was hard pressed to explain why.

Belligerence was unfastening her pants.

"Look, idiot, we've come a long, _long_ way in five years. But if you think I'm going to let you watch me _go_…"

His mouth was moving and sounds were coming out. "Then…what?"

"Oh I don't know!" she snapped. "I can't think of anything good because I really have to pee!"

With that, Belligerence shoved him into the hallway, which dimmed as she slammed her door.

Her refrigerator hummed approvingly.

End of The Girl Who Loves You Inside and Out

A/N: N/A

Random A/N: I want to see Castillo-Corrales III. No, really, that's it. I can't think of anything to say. I'm thought-out. Time to eat Singapore Rice Noodles and call the friends I haven't spoken to in about a month.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.


	9. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Chapter 8

By MidnightCereal

"It worked."

"His psychograph activity is stabilizing, and his brain's recovered from his gamma wave crash. S2 output is out of its ramp-up phase and holding at ninety-three percent of its transient peak. So I'd say that it's working. He's officially a resident of the House of Dirac. Rei did her job."

"May she rest in pieces."

"That remains to be seen, actually. There really isn't any way to tell how well she may have integrated with the third party. Here's hoping that they've come to some sort of compromise…what's funny?"

"Hoping. For her. It's funny. That's more than she's ever done for herself. So it's funny."

"This has to be weird for you…"

"How so?"

"It's ironic, that's all."

"I really don't care about the irony. It has my eyes, my hair, my ass, but that _thing_ in there with him? It's not me. You told me yourself you can't digitize a soul."

"Of course not. But between the personality transplant OS and the dummy plug you can come pretty damn close. This isn't exactly off-the-shelf technology."

"You're not about to get into it with me about the fucking costs, again. Do you really think sacrifices bother me at this point?"

"No. But then again, I'm not the one who'll have to tell him that Rei isn't here, and why."

"I'll cross that bridge when he crosses ours."

"I think he'll love the fact that you sound like his damned father."

"You'd know what his damned father sounds like."

"Fuck you."

"No. I'm not his damned father."

* * *

"Hello again," you say.

And of course, when my head swings up from between my knees -just to confirm you'd have the audacity to be smiling- you are there. I think of a sufficiently wry response, like shaking my head and going, 'I can't believe I let you pop my cherry', something that doesn't let on how angry I am.

But I _am_ angry. And I'm naked for some reason.

Maybe you're smiling because things are okay, or they're going to be. I'd like to think you know the reason I am curled up on a hillside that slopes downward, gently, into nothing, why there are serpent-back mountains on the other side of that nothing, why it's night here. Then I remember that you always smiled like that before, _always_. So that smile means everything. It means nothing. You don't know how to look any other way, do you?

"This is the border."

Eat me. What border? This is easier than asking how you know what it is I'm thinking. I have an idea of what the answer to that might be. I just don't want to hear you say it.

Right now you're making this big production of scoping out the scenery like some stupid tourist. "Your interpretation of this place, it's beautiful to me. Quite lonely, perhaps, yet befitting nonetheless. That which is fabricated to insulate two truths from each other should be utterly void. You would agree your being here is a problem?"

…yup.

And I am just going to fucking choke you if you don't start making sense.

But I'm really not, though. I'm not jumping up because I don't ever want you to see me naked again.

Your face falls a bit. Didn't know it could do that. "My choices were limited. Either seek an avenue so as to preserve the truth with which I had been entrusted, or concede that it is the lie. I was unwilling to consign oblivion to so many. They deserved the opportunity to be…" You hesitate. This is about me. Whatever you are, somewhere along the way you learned shame, "validated."

Apology _not_ accepted.

Validation, that's what I am. I've been boiled down to a tool. A wrench, and I'm fixing some big machine. Yippee.

Mihiro was saying something right before she started tickling things between the wrinkles in my brain. Something about removing hosts from their parasites? She was talking to Shinji. _About_ Shinji, about him being needed.

Even when you and I were itemized and I was falling all over you, you couldn't get his name out of your perfect mouth. It couldn't just be one of your little quirks. Couldn't be because you knew it was a sure-fire way of getting me hot, no. Because that would've been too easy. Too fair. Somehow, Shinji justifies you, _everyone_. Can't see why else someone would make or send a thing like Mihiro.

That little girl did something to me. I mean, besides sending me to my own special version of purgatory. I _feel_ her now, and her fear is like…it's like a four year-old's pissy mattress. I think, at this moment, she is running. She was like a god, what's she got to be scared of? But I suppose it just works out that everyone has a master. Maybe she belongs to the other truth you're going on about, just like right now I belong to _you_.

"You do not belong to me."

That's a first for you, you know, an outright lie. Not revealing that you were a transcendental being of inconceivable power doesn't count in my book, 'cause it never crossed me to ask if you were a transcendental being of inconceivable power. My bad.

"Any effort I had made to bind you to him would have been at best futile, had there not already been a seed of fidelity within you. There is a chasm, vast and deep, between the uncovering of one's true heart and the insertion of a false precept. I merely showed you what was already there."

See, now you're messing up. You will never have enough power to convince me there's anything 'mere' about being hostage to a name and face that are not being held hostage by you. I was not _merely_ waiting to take in his words and his smell, wasn't going to _merely_ make love to him. I wasn't ready to _just_ have his babies and_possibly_ get fat and old and if I feel up to it, die with him. Those are not merely simple things you just kinda happen to feel like doing whenever for the hell of it. That's the real chasm, you pretentious asshole. The word is 'unrequited'. Look it up.

I'm curious, now; when _did_ you sneak into me to upend what I had managed to compartmentalize, jar away with years of denial and discipline? Was it when I told you about my silly little mouse phobia? How about that time we were sitting in the music room and you're tuning a piano while Mister Sana, Musashi, Shinji and Nana pour from me? When I paused and kinda licked the side of your mouth like there was ice cream on it? When I whispered 'don't ever hide from me'? Were you even _listening_?

Or maybe it was when you were heavy on me, inside me and pushing through while I bit my lip and screwed my eyes so tight the spots behind them were shaped like Ikari? Was that when you did it, you rapist?

I think it's time you changed the subject. You do, looking shaken, which is not nearly good enough.

"Your most pressing concern should be escaping this place. If you linger, you will become nothing but a mote in a swirl of massing consciousness. You will mingle with the fragile hearts and minds of the growing lost. They will scavenge your identity to supplement their own, there will be more and more of them and you will never again be whole. You are not like them, which is why you can still leave. But you need my help."

I hope you're lying again, at first because I am getting used to the idea of hating you. Then something snakes into me, right behind my eyes: I am six, dragging myself up out of the Nishii Park public pool and I notice it's a tad drafty down you-know-where. Everyone's staring, speechless, and next they're still not talking because they're too busy laughing, like I can help it if the water's cold and my…wait, I don't have a penis.

This isn't my memory.

In exchange, the thing behind my eyes devours my mother's shining face as she bends down to comb my rust-colored bangs…

And I hate you anyway, because you were right.

Wherever 'here' is -call it the border, I don't really care- there are things massing at the edges of it, more and more arriving at its fringes by the second. They are trying to push into it, and I realize the one reason they aren't succeeding is because I am pushing back. So they are grubs in the hillside, tunneling under me. They're picking their way down the slope of the old mountains like wayward Sherpa. They are crossing the black valley below me and hiking upwards, all to get at me.

And…so what? What if I let them skeletonize me, dissect my will, divvy up and trade my memories like baseball cards? You never know, maybe right before I forget my name I'll be able to see what part of me does what I do because_ I_ want to do it, and not because you have your hand shoved up my ass.

"You do _not_ belong to me."

Well, if I go back with you I'll never find out for sure, now will I? You act as if Hikari won't move on and over me, but I'm not her mom. I'm somewhere between Touji and that creepy penguin that took hot baths, what the hell. So how about I sit here and weigh being deconstructed piece by piece against the slightest chance of you living the rest of my life for me, how's that sound? If you want Shinji so bad you can get him yourself and…

And you _don't_ have him, do you? No. That's why you used me, to trap him. With me, there'd be no reason for Mihiro. She _was_ sent by someone else…

What is he being sold?

"The other truth. If you must, think of it as a…a free trial."

In the space of time it takes me to turn back an attempt on my first day of school, I go from not liking this to hating and then being sickened by it. Deep and natural, like a bodily response to food poisoning.

They're using him. Just like you used me, just like Mister Sana did. Just like offering up protection and pretty smiles you've wrapped around road kill lies. Just like hiding the fine print with pizza night or a tongue that tastes like a comet's tail, just like _me_…

Like me.

I need them to fail.

Whoever has him, I know I need them to fail. _So completely_. I need to be the one to kill the dreams they have riding on what Shinji provides.

Care to tell me what that face is for, Captain Pious? Don't approve of me going left when you want me to go right? I really don't see the problem, here. Say I find Shinji, bring him to you and die trying. That's more than a fair trade, for you it is. He's the whole reason you touched me to begin with. I have to get away from here in any case, don't I?

"Yes. Away with…with me…"

Oh. You change as you say it. Oh, you're shuddering and you glide in front of and hover over me as you say it. Even though I'm burying the only son I never had and I can't believe you'd stretch a chalky hand out to _touch_ me, I'm able to find enough of my own voice.

And crush you.

"**Show me where he is, how to get there. And then get out of my life."**

It's odd how I only notice you have red eyes just before you close them and really, truly frown. I do not think that you'll smile again for a very long time. I was wrong about you, though; you know how to look like lots of things.

I was wrong about you.

You can't even look at me as you raise your arm and flick your delicate wrist, sending me away; I can't afford to care now, so I don't. I'm being pulled up, caught in the updraft of some flighty thought. I hope it isn't yours, it probably is. Most of the dirty, desperate fingers clinging to the ledge of my mind lose their grip and fall to you, the sliver of white and grey in a sea of night-shade evergreen that goes on forever in all directions. Then it seems to be hectares in every direction. A square mile. An acre, a square meter, a pinhead of jade floating in the universe.

Something is still clinging to me. It better not be you.

* * *

"No, it's not."

"Here?"

"No."

"This one?"

"The _other_ one, Shinji."

"_This_ other one or _that_ other one?"

"It's…it's like you were on time for the stupid train, today. Now which cabinet do I usually keep all my cups in?"

"I don't know."

"Well, you _should_. You cook in my kitchen more than _I_ do."

"I forgot, I guess." He _guessed_. Yes he did.

"_Lookit_. See my finger, where it's pointing?"

"Yes. No."

Asuka nodded solemnly and slapped a stack of mail down on a low table next to her sofa.

"Zero to retarded in four seconds flat, a new record." She stormed over, fishing a happy little mug from a compartment he had failed to inspect. "Was that so hard? I just wanted some root beer. That's all. What else have I asked you to do today?"

"Nothing," he said, not having to try very hard to play dumb. He just started here minutes ago, loitering in her bathroom for reasons known only to…well, he guessed no one actually knew. He was only sure of his name, and who _she_ was.

His stomach clenched as he watched Asuka open the fridge, retrieve and pour herself a cup of the fizzing brown beverage. It was as if he hadn't seen her in years, which was ridiculous because last Saturday they had together locked half of his things away in storage.

Why did he know that? How did he know that his girlfriend -wait, she was his girlfriend?- wasn't being completely honest when she reminded him she hadn't asked anything else of him? He said as much, because telling Asuka Langley Sohryu that she's wrong builds character.

"Because you always go out and get the damn food, Shinji. I don't know…that's your_thing_."

It was his 'thing' to shop for someone else? To be privy to their bizarre cravings and the scornful, fearful stares from cashiers as you religiously marched up to the counter with a box of extra absorbent Kotex?

He knew the answer was yes, had been for five years.

Because it had saved her.

"I've…" He hesitated, unsure of entrusting his words to his deadbeat memory, "I've been all over the place, today. To be honest, I really don't remember going into the bathroom."

"You don't have to hide it from me," she said, voice breezy-tease-y. "Now that you're moving in you and Little Shinji were going to have to sort things out sooner or later."

He sighed. "Do you_have_ to give it a name? That's just disturbing."

"You don't want to talk about it? Fine, but whoever drops it bops it." Her lips creased mischievously as her sultry eyes narrowed. Vintage Asuka, and Shinji instinctively braced himself for an uncomfortably long round of…of having her feel his forehead to check for fever.

"Hn. You don't feel warm."

_You do. _

Her hand remained. "You just don't want to do things for me, anymore?"

Shinji recognized the current of terror running just behind her sandbag smirk, but couldn't quite choke down a small laugh. It was just a silly question, silly like knocking back thirty-three aspirin just because you suggested far too early how great she would feel when she was well enough to not need you anymore, and he stopped laughing.

"If there's something special you want me to pick up while I'm out…"

She dropped her hand and glided back to her living room, arranging, rearranging. "Special like what? The regular old snacky crap not good enough for everyone else? It's a housewarming party. Apartment-warming. Whatever. It's not a royal orgy."

She paused, considered something, then shrugged and carried on.

"So I guess I need to get going…now? Or soon? Or later-"

"Only if you're going to carry all of the food yourself. Those Nerv clowns spend forty million yen a year? On recruitment? If Misato farts enough'll fall out of her bra to buy that little scrubby Honda everyone keeps going on about. You know the one. The…the…"

"…the Scrub?" Shinji blindly offered.

Air burst from Asuka, a short laugh. "What a shitty name for a shitty car…wish we had one."

Ah. That was right. He was going to leave when Misato got off from work, seeing as the sub-commander of Nerv had practically begged to give him a ride. Shinji couldn't yet recall why their former guardian had been so adamant, but there couldn't have been any justification for saying the word 'please' so many times.

Sohryu was stumbling over and cursing at a pair of dog-ear leather sandals as he occurred to something. "Not much chance of that happening. If Misato had any extra money she'd probably repair her Alpine."

"Or get a new one," Asuka appended, scooping up the tattered footwear with perfect fingers. "She _should_ just take that thing out behind a garage and shoot it in the back of its gearbox. Promise not to let her go crazy in that deathtrap, okay?"

"If it bothers you all that much I could call Kensuke, instead. He's always looking for an excuse to-ow!"

"Don't even joke," she intoned gravely, leveling the hand that had hurled the flip-flop shuriken at his unprotected nose.

"A-about _what_? All I said was-"

"Shinji. _Don't_." Severe gravity permeated her inflection, her level blue-eye stare, and she couldn't understand what there was for him to be confused about…

Of course. Of _course_. Making jokes at the expense of _The_ _Lost_ was revered in much the same was as, say, funeral crashing. It could have been worse. He could have mentioned Hikari, in which case Asuka would have thrown _real_ ninja stars.

The young lost man could only hope he survived until this place, its people, his life, revealed itself in more than random jigsaw splotches. Shinji hated puzzles. He didn't even know what was making that noise.

"Get the intercom, Shinji! Dammit…" Those long sculpted legs carrying her to the foyer were much more pleasant that her baleful sideways glare. "You know that's probably Misato."

"But, this is still your apartment. Technically."

"Touche, jerkface." With that, she turned and began hurling insults into the poor little wall-mounted kiosk, which returned with its own fiery tirade of defensive bitchy static.

It was all music to his ears, though in a way it annoyed him that everything that was worth missing was just standing there like it hadn't been dead for years and years.

In a small, small way. Itty bitty.

Teensy weensy.

So it didn't annoy him in any perceivable way at all. Shinji decided to instead chalk his unease up to Survivor Syndrome; it was something an abrupt woman with lots of wall-framed pieces of paper behind her said he would experience thanks to his torturing days…piloting days. Same difference.

"She's downstairs," said Asuka, twisting away from her apartment com to look up at him. How long had he been standing beside her? "Can you at least remember to pick me up some aspirin?"

"…why?" he asked, wariness spilling into him.

"Because I feel like pulmonary edema tonight," she said, donning a suit of armored sarcasm and shielding them both.

"How come it's okay for you to joke about something like that and I can't?"

"Be_cause_…" She fixed his red cotton collar, "you're the one that has to die. And I was at least forty-six tablets short of eternal peace. Or damnation. Depends on how much you weigh and who you talk to, though. What do _you_ think?"

Nothing. He just…held her, at first. He pressed harder against her, harder, and it seemed to squeeze something static and fading from him, some forlorn poltergeist. He felt someone else's breath washing over his cheek, someone else's breasts, full and jutting gently into him, the warmth of _their_ blood and _their_ percussing heart right before they tried ripping out his own; that was something Asuka had yet to do.

He pressed harder.

Somewhere in between the end of the world and now, he could hold her. Shinji kept waiting for her to yell, look down her elfin nose at him, make him feel her cartilage warp beneath his throttling hands.

She wasn't saying no.

The woman melted against him as her surprise wore thin. "Okay, _okay_," she breathed behind his ear, "here I am trying to put a happy face on a bad experience and you try to take advantage of it, after we just finished and everything."

Really? No wonder he was sore…and why her sleep-creased shirt looked so familiar. It was his.

She pulled away and gave him a two-hand shove to the sun-striped door. "Now hurry up and put your shoes on. I can almost hear Misato's ass getting fatter."

* * *

Shinji Ikari still liked Tokyo-3 best from his vantage point on the hardscrabble roadside vista. It was easiest here to conglomerate the teeming wards, the financial and tech sectors, the schools, all the people living and talking and teasing in it.

Macroscopy could be a wonderful thing. At least, this was what Ritsuko would have had him and his classmates believe while giving a guest lecture during his junior year at Tokyo-3 High School. Perhaps they all would have had agreed had any of them been smart enough to know what in freezing hell the polymath had been talking about.

Luckily for Shinji, he already understood the appeal of viewing complex systems on a global scale. After all, people were messy things, and _lots_ of people were…well…they were _lots_ of messy things. Through the lens of casual observation their troubles resolved themselves, homogenized, until all you saw were those distant towers rising above it all with indifferent twilight luster.

But he couldn't live that way. Neither could Asuka. They had snagged each other on endless reels of emotional red tape, and it was pretty clear to the Third Child that here, at least, neither of them wanted to be set free. He hated that it took five years from Third Impact to get this close to Sohryu.

He hated that it would be at least that long before he'd be able to convince Misato that her ass was not fat.

"She only said that because she knew you were still listening on the intercom and you'd go ballistic."

"I know that!" his former guardian barked, snapping away from the view to look on him with sober petulance. "And it worked, okay? It worked like monkey paw!"

"You're not fat, Misato."

"I'm just chunky in all the right places."

"That's right."

"_Damn_ right, and damn good for someone who's paid to sit behind a desk all day with a big honkin' rubber stamp."

"Good point."

"I'd use the stairs at Nerv, believe me!"

"I do."

"If Nerv _had_ any stairs. Think back to when you were there, was there any place you went, any trip from point A to point B that didn't involve an elevator or a moving platform, or, or a freakin' catapult?"

"No."

"See? _See?_ That is _not_ a place for healthy people. Stupid Ritsuko, smoking her lungs out like there're rabbits living in them and she's lost weight."

"Maybe she's just got good genes."

"She's got me sick is what she's got. I hate her. Cancer slut."

"You don't mean that."

"Maybe I should start smoking again."

"_Misato_-"

"Well, I have to do something, because if that redheaded stepchild calls me fat one more time you're gonna be a widower!"

"We're just living together, we're not getting married."

"And you never will be if she says something, tonight. I can't help it if I don't have some hot young stud working me out every night!"

"I doubt that. Did you just call me a stud?"

"Isn't that better than 'Heavy Ikari', or whatever that cashier at the front kept calling you? Because that was…what was _that_ about?"

"Nothing. I'm, um, a preferred customer, that's all."

"Oh…" The rant bled out of Misato as she sighed through her nose and settled next to him. For the first time since she had picked him up from Asuka's place, the not-fat-just-chunky-in-all-the-right-places-thank you very much thirty-four year-old didn't fill the space between them with so _many_ dirty words. Something had lurked around the corner from every filthy limerick and ear-burning double entendre, anyway. Perhaps now, it was the right time, the right place, to reveal it.

"They're late, you know," she announced quietly, tilting her head in the direction of the stunted mechanized skyline. "I guess not waiting to die makes it all little more than a drill."

He was shaking his head. "Drills are good, compared to everything else that could happen." _Did happen_, a voice amended. "If all they have are evacuation drills for the next fifty years, shouldn't everyone be happy with that?"

Misato shrugged a soft shoulder against him. "You sound like you know better than me." She answered the question in his eyes. "Don't hate me for saying this, but I had thought that showing you this, that first time, it'd make you feel…I don't know…connected to them. We were kinda screwed if you decided to leave."

"I couldn't hate you, Misato. I'm just sorry that you"_ someone always always_"needed someone like me. I know it wasn't easy for you, either."

"Stop it," Misato chided sharply, "like you're the only one" that has to die "in history to ever run away from anything. You ever ask yourself why my best friends in the world have been a mad scientist and a mutant penguin?"

"Not really."

"Oh…" she said, squeaking off as a jet ripped a gash along the blazing edge of the world. Behind them, the Alpine creaked like the settling bones of an old great cat in a mangy blue pelt. She smiled, oddly. "Why not?"

Huh? "It's just a weird thing to think about, that's all."

"So now thinking about me is weird?" she asked, ice forming at the fringes of her voice.

"_No_…I didn't mean it like that."

"I _know_ you didn't" she said tiredly, "Woulda thought you'd be able to tell when I was kidding, by now."

He _could_ tell. And she hadn't been kidding. All of their interactions of late seemed to end with her making a face as if he had accidentally broken some ancient family heirloom of hers; this was quite extraordinary to Shinji, seeing as Katsuragi had no close relatives to speak of. No uncles, no aunts, cousins or in-laws. She had no one.

"And I would've thought you'd realize that I'm always going to be flinchy."

"Yup!" She leaned into him, imbrued by the busy amalgam he had come to know simply as_Misato's Smell_, "Your backbonelessness, Asuka's bansheeness, my flawlessness, pillars of civilization, Shin-chan. Goes together like us and this mountaintop."

"It _is_ like a tradition. You always drive here to tell me things."

"Things…" She looked directly at him, uncaring of the closeness of his face. "Maybe you can take _your_ kids up here one day. Imagine how easy it'd make explaining where babies come from when all you'd have to do is point to the growing buildings?"

The young man only shook his head and gave a short, breathless laugh. "You know who I'm going to introduce you to? Mihiro. You two would be like sisters."

She blinked. "Who?"

"She's…" Shinji bit his tongue, realizing the person that belonged to that name was as familiar to him as she was to his former guardian. He'd have better success holding onto a thrashing carp. "Nobody. Anyway, Asuka's not trying to have any kids."

He swallowed. "And why should we? We'd make awful parents. Our first child would be a mess. And our second, our grandchildren…their cats."

"You wanna curb some of that youthful exuberance before you put someone's eye out?" Misato muttered, then humming with resignation, "I saw this coming, honestly. Just…some people have more love in them to go around than others. To tell the truth, it's a miracle she doesn't just go around hating everything."

The former pilot agreed, and silently mulled while some solicitous daydream propositioned her. Unthinkingly, he asked, "What would you…what would happen to her, you think, if something happened to me? If something happened and I didn't come back?"

The moment that she misunderstood was unbearable. "Why are you asking _that_? Is something wrong?"

"She said something strange about me having to die…forget it, I probably just misunderstood."

"Of course you misunderstood. I don't really see what she has to gain by watching her world fall apart, and having to figure out how to be alone again while simultaneously finding a new reason to live. It all sounds a bit counterproductive to me."

"She told you that?" he asked.

The woman's voice turned with lukewarm humor. "Do you think she'd let me walk around with that kind of information? I was nearly assassinated for less." Her mouth became a neutral crease before parting, "I just know it's twice as hard to find yourself when you have to do it in the dark."

"It sounds almost like I did something to her. Like I made her weak."

"There's nothing wrong with being wanted," Misato stated, the words solidifying into fact in the stale muggy air, "And don't ever let her hear you say that. You should be used to the idea of Asuka needing you by now."

There was no warning. Otherworldy malice fell upon him, viral, eating lustily, picking away at subconscious niceties and bearing to the world his heart. Injured. Beating.

Black.

"_Everybody_ needs me…"

The cry of a synthetic beast stretched over the city now soaked with sound and sunset amber. A city that began growing, and Misato hadn't even the courtesy to marvel at it; she was too busy crushing the life out of her former charge.

"This sure is happening a lot today," Shinji wheezed.

"Shut up. We're having a moment." His cheeks bulged when she squashed them, and their noses touched. He wondered what it would be like to kiss her without a mouthful of blood, which, he mused, he'd have anyway if his girlfriend knew he'd allowed Misato to touch him like this.

She whispered, an injured rustling, "You don't say that like it's a bad thing…the_worst_ thing. No one would rely on you if you couldn't handle it. You're a big boy, now…" Then, with infinitely puckish glee, "I don't care _what_ Asuka says…"

* * *

"God, I didn't mean_anything_ by it," Asuka sighed. "Do I go around saying things just to get a rise out of peop-don't you _answer__ that_!"

Shinji shut his mouth.

She turned, flinging the refrigerator open with extraordinary pomp. "Where's that big thing of somen Hyuga brought with him?" He told her. When she was finished asking why'd you put it all the way in the back, no, you_did_ it because you can't get enough of this view, isn't that right you milkshake-craving closet ass-bandit, she extracted the food and unfolded herself in time to be buzzed by a four-foot blur.

"Hey!" Asuka palmed the fidgeting girl's black-haired crown, twisting her like a pickle jar until they faced each other. "Short Round, what do you say?"

"S'cuse me," the preteen instinctively blurted, too busy grabbing at a bag on the kitchen counter to be cowed by the German's formidable…everything. "I need the chips."

"You _need_ to spend some time with me before you turn into your stupid brother. You're not a stooge, you're a princess, so start acting like one. Got me?"

"Gotcha."

The woman waited a beat before releasing Mari Suzahara into her natural habitat. Shinji watched the girl passively, unknowing of what kept him from asking her about her cello lessons-

"Wha…huh?"

"I asked who's the new guy out there?" Asuka repeated, ripping the cellophane from the large cold bowl. "The one next to Akagi."

It was harder to breathe than to remember. He was now used to both the air and his past. "That's her new assistant, Ed, I think. They haven't been working together that long, though. Three weeks, maybe."

"Hey everyone…" a voice tipsily distinguished itself from the ubiquitous clamor in the living room.

The redhead murmured dissentingly and handed him a paper plate meal. "What was wrong with Chiaki? Or Lee? I like them better than this Ed clown. He has no elbows."

"What?"

"Where're his fucking elbows? Watch him walk and tell me he's not made out of rubber."

"Everyone, I have an announcement…"

Shinji twisted his palms up, careful to keep his disposable dish level. "They weren't Maya, that's what was wrong with them. Neither is Ed, but Ritsuko's not stopping anyone from applying." He chewed on a ragged spool of noodles. "And Ed's a girl."

"I know you can all_hear me_…"

Asuka looked down at herself before sparing him a slanted smile. "See these? I think I know a girl when I see one."

"HEY, SHUT YOUR STUPID CAKEHOLES! I'M DRUNK AND POIGNANT!"

The commotion beyond the kitchen withered.

"She's drunk, at least," Asuka muttered. "You said Misato didn't buy any booze."

"She didn't," he quietly affirmed, following her back to the party. "We had some soft stuff, last cabinet on the left and I passed that out. Maybe she had something stashed and spiked her drink?"

She glared at him over her shoulder. "She _spiked_ her _alcohol_?"

"_There_ you are!" Misato called to them with a lurching drawl. Her shot glass pitched forward as she shook a free rubbery finger. "All recharged from your evening quickie?"

As one, the assembly turned to the couple like satellite dishes tracking a link across the sky; Touji and his sister, Ritsuko, Aoba, Hyuga, a half-dozen other faces, splitting embarrassment, bemusement, and butt-nekkid curiosity amongst themselves. All of their faces were so damned familiar. And patient.

"W-we were only gone a minute," Shinji stammered.

"Hey, I _said_ quickie."

"Misato," warned Ritsuko, "you're about to get stupid…"

"And you're about to get dropkicked," Katsuragi cheerfully threatened. "It isn't like it isn't one of those things that you shouldn't not talk about. I'll chance that Miss Sohryu's begging for a few pointers, anyway."

"A _fat_ chance," Miss Sohryu helpfully pointed out.

"HYUGA! WHERE'S MY GUN?"

"You told me to hide it from you in case Asuka called you fat."

"Good man." Misato nodded sanctimoniously. "Remind me to fire you."

"Yes ma'am."

"Misato, didn't you have something ignorant to say?" asked Asuka.

The woman's head whipped over to her former charge with steely beer goggles. "Ignorant? Is proposing a toast to you and Ikari ignorant? Is using this little soiree to dredge up every humiliating thing I've known you to have done ignorant? Is blowing chunks all over your carpet ignorant?"

And people moved.

"I'll tell you what's ignorant, Rotkäppchen. Expecting someone who's logged all of six hours in a first-gen Arm Slave simulator to pilot a Halberd. Do I _look_ like Sergeant Sagara?" She waited. "I'm asking you a question, Touji!"

"Um…?" the large young man said neutrally, careful not to show fear.

"No! No I don't! Just because I like dick doesn't mean I ever want to own one. Mari here knows what I'm talking about!"

"_Stop_ her," Asuka hissed.

"Why me?" Shinji parried.

"Because if she really has to throw up it might as well be on the one she likes best."

But no one stopped her, so Misato bumblebeed further into some antagonizing, liquor-warped memory.

"But nuthin' could eeeevvvveeeer be easy with you, could it, Mao? 'Sir, I can't adjust the tension in my Muscle Packages.' 'Figure it out, Katsuragi.' 'Sergeant Major Mao, why am I losing real-time uplink for the health of my jamming subsystem?' 'Figure it _out_, Katsuragi.' 'Sergeant Major, how is it that Mithril routinely thwarts embedded terrorist networks but can't find me a pair of panties that won't make my ass look like it was carpet bombed?' 'Figure it out. Figure it out. _Figure_ _it_ _out_.' Oh, I figured it out, alright! Figured out you're a bitch!"

At that, Ritsuko rose with a viscous put-on sigh. "I think you're done being poignant tonight, Misato," She pursed her thin glossed lips, "and you're scaring Mari."

In the corner of Shinji's eye, a short head of black hair bobbled vigorously.

"Wha-no!" In a surprisingly crisp motion, the alcoholically-devastated woman transferred said source of devastation to the hand furthest from her best friend's reach. "Hands off, Smokey the Clown! I haven't finished congratulating them!"

"Consider them congratulated, so we should go before you do something that will have you owing them money. Again." The blonde clasped Misato's shoulder, the jaws of a friendly pit bull. "Just guarantee me that your blue rust box won't crap out in the middle of Shinjuku-3 and you'll have a ride home, tonight."

A single moment hung in the air.

Then Misato's face abruptly crumpled.

"But I want to stay_here_!" she mewled pitifully. Shinji realized with sucker punch swiftness; that hadn't been the alcohol talking, or vandalizing her face with desperate candor. "_Please_, Ritsu, they don't need me, anymore. Let me talk to them, I hardly get to talk to them, anymore. Let go!"

"_No_." Akagi snapped rigidly, and Shinji could see her will press against their squirming guests. "Now put the glass down, Mihiro, you're embarrassing them."

* * *

It hadn't been long before Ritsuko successfully corralled and sedated her college roommate. Not many people said no to Commander Akagi nowadays, as it had roughly the same effect as receiving a transfusion of the wrong blood type.

Soon afterwards, people left in a smokescreen of thanks-for-the-food's and be-seein'-ya's, with the snatch of Asuka's red satin whisper filling the lull between each departure. He remembered how to do everything she asked of him, and in return he had been allowed to forget the graphic sadness that had butchered all the happy things jitterbugging in Misato's earth-hued eyes.

_Had_ forgotten.

"Why are you moving so damned much?" Asuka asked, her voice parched with arid sleep. She was laying on her side, the outline of her bare shoulder a sinuating ribbon of smoke.

"Sorry," he said, breathing on her neck in the darkness.

"Don't be sorry. Be_still_. You should be tired." Her contour warped. He adjusted to match it. "Really, _really_ tired."

Asuka settled some, her breath a slow but conscious thing. She was waiting.

"You know what it's probably like for her?" he asked. "We were all together for a just a few months, but she could still say it was me, you, and her. And now it's me and you. And then her. I think tonight just drove that fact in. Like if her kids don't call her own place home, anymore."

"Please don't talk like we're siblings while we're spooning," she calmly intimated. "So what do you want to do, have her move in with us? I still don't know what that smell was that came from her room, but I do know I'm done having _that_ shit up my nose. _Verstehen Sie_?"

"Yeah, of course," he said quickly, "but we can't shut her out. I wouldn't even be surprised if she planned what she did, tonight. I don't think she has anything. Just us."

"So you're magnified," she said, and he imagined Asuka's smile scythed cruelly across her mouth.

Maybe that was why he got up, because of the odd way she said it. "I'll be back. I gotta take a whiz, or something."

He picked his way through the smother of midnight blue, reaching the bedroom door when her tongue clicked dryly. "Shinji? Shinji, wait."

He hadn't heard that quiet urgency in years. "Yeah?"

"I just…Shinji, I just want you to know…"

"Yes…?"

"I want you to know…that if you leave the seat up…I'll pile drive you into the stove."

He liked that stove. He liked its clean industrial lines and the way it cooked rice noodles, and the fact that his head had not yet been driven forcefully into it.

Shinji's hands worked themselves into a soapy froth beneath the amber of a cycloptic nightlight, and the idea rose in him. _I'll make rice noodles for her, tomorrow._ He'd make some for Misato, too.

Asuka would be content keeping the older woman distant and phasing around the world her and Shinji were beginning to make for themselves. That was clearer than the piece of abstract crystal Ritsuko had presented them with when she walked through the door. The truth of the matter _was_ probably rooted in the German's meager capacity to love…to love_Misato_, which was only as easy as loving herself.

It would be like that until Katsuragi grayed, sagged, until her zeal for f-bombs and f-bombing faded, until she was so diluted and asexual that her hugging him could no longer be seen as an act of war.

_Good luck with that…_

Shinji screwed off the hissing spigot, looking into the mirror and the face which peered dutifully at him from its shallow shadowed coves. He looked worried, did not feel it scrawled on his face or squirreling in his stomach. Ritsuko said it was his default face, and if Doctor Akagi said it, then it must be true. So he and his reflection turned from each other, and that was when some asshole stuck their foot out in front of him.

There was a moment between losing his balance, corkscrewing and the rattle-thud of his tailbone smacking into the lip of the doorframe; his mind had washed over with burnt umber cello lessons, steel-blueprint ledger instrumentals, ascending rollercoaster scales in octaves.

They shouldn't be there. They were assorted hills of junkyard memories, clashing and jutting up like tombs for a garage sale pharaoh, but they were there.

Mana Kirishima was there.

Shinji could only gulp like a stranded perch as he reclined on the points of his elbows. He stared at the -no, not a girl, anymore- propped up into a sitting position, her legs shooting out from the flared hem of her virgin sundress. Mana's head lulled to the side from her rubbery neck, but he saw movement, just enough so that he knew she wasn't like Kensuke or Hikari or Maya. Pain slid across her mouth and fluttering eyelids as if fighting the exhaustion from her wearisome trip.

From _where_?

"Mana…?" Shinji whispered, his hissing strains bouncing off the tiles. She didn't stir. She was hurt. Maybe. Or just tired, or _anesthetized_, or, oh hell, who knows, maybe some witch wriggled her nose and Mana was there and he didn't know _how_…

"Say if you can hear me." Nothing. The hush lifted off his voice. "It's been forever. How'd you get here…Mana?" Nothing. Louder. "Mana!"

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?"

He felt every decibel of Asuka's booming query. Mana's brow shot down before smoothing out again, that was it.

He began to worry.

"Asuka! You _need_ to come _see_ this-"

"I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR KIDNEY STONE!"

"No, it's_important_, it's…" Shinji started to pull himself into a kneeling position, his foot dragging over Mana's **want to touch her she's so close traitors are all so close but she's kind patient don't you see that she's trying so hard she'd die for an ounce of trust and I always kill her kill her every time and she broke once but came back like a lion to save me until the fingers in her mind sprayed her all over my living room **shin.

Ow.

Then Asuka kicked him in the back.

"Ow!"

"You even left the seat up!" she snapped as she loomed behind. "This better be good, Ikari, because I'm not liking the prospect of stubbing my toe on your ass anymore than…"

She saw.

"What is she doing here?"

It was the right question, of course, but the way it had been asked…two left feet, sound in outer space…

"She hasn't moved since…" Shinji paused, craning toward the slumped-over woman. "Mana…she was just _here_. I don't know how but we're not going to sit and watch her-"

"Don't touch her."

"What?" His face whipped up to Sohryu, and again he puzzled at her deviant inflection. "But…something is _wrong_ with her-"

"And you don't know what, do you? You want to make it worse?"

Asuka didn't sound like she cared whether or not he made it 'worse'.

So he got closer.

"Shinji." Lurid, queer urgency.

"I'm just going to check her pulse."

"Shinji, _don't_."

He did.

And this time something stuck. It buried itself and cracked open to cast thirsting tendrils through him. The world seemed to…_twist_ around where he clasped her soft wrist, spiraling outward in night-lit peppermint swirls. Real places couldn't do that.

He _should_ touch Kirishima. He should be all over her, because she was real, he knew suddenly. And everything else here was…was what?

He had to practically wean himself from Mana before standing.

"Shinji…?"

He hated the desperate tinge of Sohryu's voice, now, its fragility, its perfectly rehearsed theatricality.

"I need to use your phone."

"I don't have a landline, remember?"

Shinji remembered, only because it jogged into him like a lawyer's smirking son forty minutes late for his final exam. Like everything else here, it was a second late, a synapse short, a millimeter off. Off, off, off, _off_…

"Then your cell phone, do you have it on-" He stopped himself. She was between service plans. _He_ was going to get the same stupid plan. _Free Minute Fridays_.

Shinji stilled himself, thinking and deciding, jerking into a lanky stride. He swam past her in a swift current, swinging the bedroom door wide open to grab the snaking leg of his denim jeans from off the carpet. A shadow slid over the false twilight in the hallway.

"What're you putting your clothes on for? Where are you _going_?"

_Stop talking like that, like you're acting. I love you so stop acting around me._

"The neighbors," he answered, "downstairs, flag down a car, I don't know. Someone needs to look at her_, I don't know_."

"Don't leave. She'll be fine." He snapped to the doorframe silhouette, muted by incredulity. "She's probably just sleeping off-"

"How do _you_ know?" he pressed, finally sick of the weirdness and Asuka's newfound, stupid opaqueness. Frustration surged over him like a tide of magma, like the hatred that had consumed him in the sunset overlooking the city. "How? You said yourself we shouldn't move her. Fine. We don't move her. But she's just sitting there-"

"Ikari, calm down-"

"-we don't know what the hell is going on with her and…and she _needs_ me, she's been waiting for me to do something for her and now-"

* * *

I've been faxed. Faded and compressed, but approved.

At least I'm wearing clothes, now. I think I am, but it isn't worth the effort to open my eyes. Or talk or stand. I'm dressed and sitting, having that dream where I tell myself to wake up in T-minus 5…4…3…2…

Mission aborted. I'm jetlag-on-Jupiter tired.

I feel myself come online by the molecule, and familiar lacey frills dance along the nape of my crooked neck-oh jeez, I'm wearing _that_? At least I don't have Eclipse-chan; the air is cool on my head.

A tug on my ankle, the bad one. Something crashes in the darkness beyond my eyes, I don't hear it but it reverberates through my legs, my backside, through the dollhouse wall at my back.

Someone's clumsy, someone is moving like they're dizzy-drunk slobbering over me, and maybe going through all the ways he can have with me. Don't let it be that, please, don't touch me, don't use me again, why can't I wake up and tell him to stop, sound won't come out even though it's now coming in…

"-ay if you can hear me how'd ou get ear Ma a…Mana!"

So now what? What's the point of coming here if I can't even say 'Stop yelling, Shinji, I can hear you just'…

Oh shit, it's _you_. Moving around me. You're fretting. You're a fret machine, and your frets per minute increase when a voice shrieks at you through the thin walls.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?"

_God_, Mihiro._That's_ who you were talking about? I was up against a dead girl and I _still_ couldn't win?

She doesn't sound very dead right about now. She doesn't sound like a girl anymore, either.

"What is she doing here?"

I'm ruining your little rendezvous as soon as I remember how my tongue works, you loudmouthed life-wrecking bitch. You told me you weren't spoken for, Shinji. This feels like revenge…

"I'm just going to check her pulse."

I'm okay, I am, but I don't complain. _Can't_. You touch me on the wrist. So gently, always so gently, always on the hand or shoulder or piece of damn lint on the inner thigh of my pants leg, way up there but never, ever all the way.

Was she the reason? Were you scared that she was watching you? Judging you if you ended up on top of me? Why do her jealousies override mine? What makes her more real than me? For five years **I was more real than she **could even hope to be, and all you had to do was find me, _take_ me**. I was the one** that came back. Who hurt you more, me or her? **I'm not the lie, Shinji, _she_ is**…

You drag yourself away like I'm fire in Siberia. Fatigue courses to me. By the time I find myself, I'm alone again.

"-utting your clothes on for? Where are you goi-"

No.

"-wn a car, I don't know. Someone needs to look at her_, I_-"

No they _don't_! I'm fine, you idiot! Don't go, _please_ don't leave me with this crazy dead German in this strange place! Talk, touch me, again! I came all the way here for _you_, I might be dead right now for _you_! Why can't you see that? You have to _see_, I have to make you see now-

"-you're telling me I _can't_? _WHY?_"

My eyes slam open.

* * *

Her outline, framed by the shining doorway, stiffened.

But he had to yell, to let her know that this was _different_. So let Asuka scream back, throw things, kick his-

"You're seeing her," she said quietly.

"I _do_ see her." He took his sloppy shirt with its musk of spilt wine and lavender perfume, pulling it over his head as he walked to her. "I see her flying apart. It happened yesterday. How's that possible, Asuka?"

"You _are_ all over the place, today," **I love you,** "that's how," she said, her face glowing strangely. "You're the one that needs to see a doctor, not her."

"I don't think so, anymore." He made a move forward and stopped. "I can't get to my shoes if you're standing in the way."

"Shinji, don't lea-"

"PLEASE."

He briefly considered shoving her -shoving Asuka!- before she swung open like a rusted gate. Before she watched him switch on the lights and march into the living room - past the kitchen and the couch draped over with someone's forgotten jacket. He was at the foyer and leaving and she was always watching and following.

"When are you going to be back?"

"When I find help." His Converse fit like a mother's hug. Asuka knew his shoe size-

"So when the hell is_that_ going to be?"

"Whenever it is I_find_ _help_. A _phone_. Doctor Akagi." Looping the laces up and under. "Miss Asai-"

"She's sixty! You have any idea what time it is?"

"This is _important_." Threading, pulling.

"More important than_me_?"

"What does that even_mean_? This isn't about you!" Knotting. Tightening.

"Answer the question, Shinji!"

"No, because it's a stupid question!" Tighter.

"Tell me to my face! Look at me, I'm right here!"

"NO YOU'RE NOT! YOU'RE NEVER WHERE I AM! YOU WERE NEVER ON THE BEACH AND SHE _IS_ MORE IMPORTANT BECAUSE YOU ALWAYS SAY NO!"

He was shaking apart, so close to her he swore he could see his reflection in her shock-reamed eyes.

There, he did it. Right to her face which, when he blinked, was no longer there.

Just a featureless rouge-tinged canvas framed by auburn swept across it like rusty cirrus clouds. He was going to be sick with fear, because there was_nothing_ _there_ but that heart-shaped template, you could pick out Asuka's face from the spring catalogue and snap it in place with cheap plastic fasteners.

It's never her. Always some fetid judging corpse or walking doll, not her…

Shinji Ikari blinked again. Her mouth coiled upward with a defiant, crippled smile.

"That is the craziest thing I've heard since I quit Eva." She shook her head as if following a microscopic ping-pong match. Her eyes were there, wet. "You're crazy, Shinji. It finally happened."

"I…" He swallowed, looking and waiting for her mask to slip from its layman moorings, "I'll be right back…don't touch her."

"You're…good to me. You keep me sane." She was reaching up. He saw her, fourteen again, blue eyes gabled as she stared down at him with disdain. He just couldn't reconcile that with the charity in this…this _fake_. "If you're sick, you won't have to be sick alone-"

**Don't you tou**

"ch me. _Don't touch me_." Shinji was stepping back towards the door, fingers searching for the 'Open' chevron. "Don't touch _her_. Don't move."

His hand ran over a soft, smooth patch in the wall. Shinji depressed it. There was a whir and a whoosh. He had to hope there was something real beyond this diorama, this life-sized playhouse and the animated mannequin that stretched his shirt with its pert plasticine breasts. Someone down the hall, someone real, please, he shouldn't be leaving Mana but she needed help…

As he was busy remembering that Miss Asai was out of town,his foot slipped back into emptiness.

It was a giant step, the next tread swallowed by depth and darkness. His stomach launched itself at the rectangle of light and the etched figure peering out from it, but the aperture was rising and shrinking so fast.

There wasn't any wind snapping at his sleeves or billowing his shirt or pants, but Shinji knew he was falling away from the imposter that said everything he ever wanted to hear. He was falling away from Misato, from Touji, his sister who had grown so much and was turning beautiful and he knew forgave him.

He was falling away from Mana, falling and failing her again.

Leaving her behind.

* * *

They stopped when the bank of lights above them clapped off, once again plunging them briefly into mute pitch blackness before powering up.

And then down.

"Stay with us, Itabachi," said Sayed Rahman. He was a tall bronze-skinned man composed entirely of hard, straight lines.

The corridor bloomed with misty predawn azure. Kensuke could see Matsuo Itabachi's jowls fold as he looked across to their immediate superior. "Why the hell're you picking on me?"

The light snuffed out. Bloomed.

"Because you're Itabachi," Rahman said matter-of-factly.

Matsuo smirked before the world went black again. "Hey, my dad's been dead for ten years and I never even knew my mom. Plus it's not like I had a girl to cry over or anything."

Rahman stopped just short of gasping. "Get _out_?"

Lukewarm luminescence. "Sir, I just want you to know that if for some reason I don't make it through the night, that you can kiss my fat ass."

"It's against my religion to eat pork, Itabachi, you know that."

"YOU CAN TAKE YOUR…it_is_?"

The Saudi man looked at Kensuke. "How about you, Aida? Are you holding up?"

Before Kensuke Aida had received the call to accompany Rahman and Itabachi, his mother had slipped out from the dusty crevice between the coffee and snack vending machines in the level 2-A lounge. She had her broomstick arms thrust out as she pleaded for her brave little soldier to give her one more hug, just one more.

She seemed to have towered over him, smelling of vapor rub and ammonia with that floral print hospice gown hanging from her bones like paper skin. That was the only way he knew she hadn't been real.

"I'm holding up."

"Try to show a little enthusiasm," agent Rahman suggested. "You were dying for a little responsibility, and this happens. Think positively."

Kensuke did not want to think at all. He could open a door down here and mom could be behind it, he could turn a shadowed corner and she could be around it. She'd have those hands and those veins that rose up like blue snakes wriggling against the tent of drawn skin. Her hands would be begging him to finally die with her…

But it wasn't real.

She wasn't real.

The three of them had minutes ago dropped swiftly though seven levels of headquarters before gravity peaked and the elevator yawned open.

It had deposited them onto a floor delegated to Tech Division One, and it was here, Kensuke knew, that the sub-organization ran many of their experiments, anything from single process DNS to prognostics for cavitation near high-velocity screws. The high-end tools for ongoing tests occupied some of the spaces behind sliding steel doors; they walked past those and other rooms, where equipment from previous successes and failures were horded by some technophilic pack rat. There they huddled and dusted over.

The corners of the hallway stretched past the three, congregating at a faraway vertex. With so many doors, so many experiments, it was hard for Aida not to think about how much this little disaster was costing Nerv. And by little, he meant national.

"Here's where we gotta be," Itabachi breathed.

The trio stopped in front of a seemingly random door. When the lights again shuttered on, the numbers 0932 blinked irritably at Kensuke from the automated bulwark. From the outside, the room seemed all too much like the others that obediently lined this high-tech catacomb.

And that was exactly the way that Maya Ibuki liked it.

She was the inheritor of the curiously bright and sunny affair that had been Ritsuko Akagi's office. Bright and sunny suited Maya just fine, and the space itself was located on a floor accessible to all personnel, who invariably came to her with all manner of Nerv-related dilemmas. Great things. Small things.

Impossibly tiny, stupidly, incredibly Lilliputian, microscopically, hugely insignificantly small things.

Although general clearance extended two floors below this one, hardly anyone voluntarily came this far. It was where ideas went to die.

"So…" The word languished in Itabachi's thick, strong neck, "you really think she popped?"

"Well, that's what we're here to find out," Rahman answered. A sense of surrealism crept in from the corners of Aida's weak eyes as he watched the man press the room's intercom button.

Then an amazing thing happened. Nothing. And it happened for about ten seconds before Kensuke realized he was being stared at. "Huh, y-yeah?"

"The card, Mister Aida," Rahman said carefully, "I was saying to give me the card."

The bifocaled young man fished around in his black pants pocket and did what he was told.

They were still watching him. Itabachi's mouth flattened in a way Kensuke associated with apprehension.

"Are you holding up?" the bronze-skinned man asked. "Aida?"

_She wasn't real. Is this how it's like for you, Shinji?_

"I'm holding up."

Sayed Rahman didn't pursue Kensuke's D-plus conviction. The skeleton card key swung though a magnetic reader, which was persuaded to see the world with its green eye instead of its red one.

The large sliding door whined a quarter of the way open…and froze as the electricity petered.

"Aw, crap," Matsuo groused, reaching into the folds of his suit-

"Mister Itabachi," Raman said tiredly, "my dear stupid son, what on Earth are you doing?"

"My gun…" The heavy set man shrugged. "You know…just in case."

The Saudi man slipped through the frozen glowing mouth. "In case Doctor Ibuki leaps out from behind her desk and crushes your throat? She's the head of Tech One, not our ninja clan."

Matsuo's power hand fell to his side. Muttering something about smart-ass superiors, he sucked in his sumo gut and followed. Kensuke realized he was turning sideways and shuffling in as well. In there he could at least ask if whatever he was seeing was actually there.

Not that there was much to see, just the clutter of a scientific intellectual. Four or five tables aggregated in a far corner like giant scrabble pieces. They were burdened with crates, boxes, tall dog-eared decks of bound journals, magazines and textbooks. The same could be said of the bookshelf pushed against one of the walls, two of its levels a makeshift shrine to instant coffee and cheap filters.

A boxy ventilation duct ran the length of the ceiling. It glowed obscenely in the blue strobe shading all aspects of the space and radiating from an impressively large computer monitor. In the middle of the room, Mister Rahman and Matsuo milled about.

Other than that, there was nothing. No one.

"You're sure Ueto said she'd be in here?"

Itabachi was addressing him "What I said was that Doctor Ueto was the last person to have contact with her. That was at five-thirty."

"That was five hours ago, Kensuke."

Aida's brow dipped as he eyed Matsuo. "I _know_ what time it is. What do you want me to do about SOP? This is the best lead we have and we're going on it, alright?"

_C'mon, Maya, you didn't, tell me you're stronger than that and you didn't_-

"Mister Aida's right," said Sayed Rahman from a small empty nook. "Would you invest in a pair of glasses on Monday if you knew your eyes would be plucked out on Tuesday?"

"I wear contacts," Itabachi said tempestuously, "All I'm saying is this: if we knew things were gonna suck like today is sucking we woulda tagged this woman, because her ninjitsu is fucking best."

"I was just joking about the ninja thing."

Matsuo Itabachi huffed and stepped toward the older man. "Christ, Sayed, I'm not stupid! You now exactly what I know, exactly nothing. The only person that knows more than that should be here and she-"

The sound was faint, but they all heard and froze. It was the wet rippling creep of something dropped and spilling. Itabachi looked down, and Kensuke watched his smile turn sweet like a slit wrist.

"Sayed? She…just like the others…"

"Stay with us, Itabachi."

"I'm standing in her, sir. I can see her socks…her bra…I'm standing in her."

Sayed Rahman held his hands out peaceably. "Itabachi, be cool."

"I _am_ cool, sir."

"Step out of her, Itabachi…good."

Kensuke tried not to cry.

"Now," Rahman continued, the chill of professionalism frosting him, "I want you to contact Choi. I want you to tell him that Doctor Ibuki has been found. Tell him she's been disincorporated-"

"And that we're screwed…"

"_Look at me_." The older man's voice whetstoned as he pointed at Matuso. "We don't have time for this. It's a simple order and we need to know what to do next."

"Yes. Yes sir."

Itabachi had presumably skulked around the copper-tang puddle that used to be Maya, and squeezed out into the corridor before contacting HQ.

"Aida."

Kensuke hadn't noticed, his attention rooted to Ibuki's cherry wood desk, in front of the flickering screen.

"Mister Aida?"

It was a ledger, and a letter scrawled onto it with hasty, desperate strokes of ink. The characters seemed to blend, to bleed into one another like handoffs in a relay race, running until the white lined sheet was filled.

But it wasn't filled.

"I'm holding up," said Kensuke, and he tried very hard not to cry.

End of Chapter 8

A/N: I think I agree with Someone's assessment most. I was planning on NTR on being a little more involved than In the Dark Room. I didn't want to hurt people's brains. I tried to have the first scene, second and last scene provide useful info. Then again, I originally wanted NTR to be three 5,000-word chapters. That's funny. No it isn't.

I should probably also speak on the delay for this chapter. It's what it always is. I'm in school, school follows me home, it looks over my shoulder and asks what I'm doing, it tells me that it's late and I have to go to bed because I have to pay attention to it tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

If things go as planned, formal schooling ends forever in exactly one week for me. I would have a job, and -this is how the legend goes- I can actually stop working once I leave the office, and this would be around 5:00 or 5:30. And I'll only have to work on weekdays. Can anyone confirm?

So I'll start the final chapter in about a week, I guess. Even in my head, it's long, but it's tighter than this one, which was always awkward, because there are long swaths where Shinji and Asuka and Misato just say things.

The intent was to demonstrate a type of funhouse mirror slice of life, where the facts that he's having these domestic discussions and he's talking to people who should be dead and gone are really the point. It was too abstract, even for _this_ story, so I added the first scene, whose purpose is to give context to all of that talking. Tried to make it interesting.

So…everyone, thank you very much for being patient. I'm going to do my best to clear things up during the last chapter.

Stop laughing.

Warp: I remember you having a thread where you had coupled Full Metal Panic and Eva. Was it because Allison Keith voices Misato and Melissa Mao? I just thought that was funny, as one of the ideas I had for a story happened to be a NGE/FMP crossover _about_ Misato. Pre-Sachiel. It might even be my next story after Valley Girl. In my head, I don't see Mao and Katsuragi getting along. They're way too much alike.

Random A/N: Why does everyone think I'm crazy? It's not my fault I have Kool-Aid for blood.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

No offense to all you lawyer's sons out there.


	10. Child of Glasgow3

Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Studio Gainax production, its characters created by Hideaki Anno. They say the word, and this story ceases to exist.

Normal to Reality: Child of Glasgow-3

By MidnightCereal

Shinji,

This is not how it was supposed to be and I regret I never took it upon myself to know what Ritsuko knew as well as she knew it but our time here was wrong and this place is incomplete, this I'm sure of. I don't blame you, I just cant, they shoved you and forced you made you crazy and so I helped and lives were split down the middle on the grain of your pyscghe pysh psyche. You split us all up and it's odd how it isn't your fault. But I miss my brother I miss Ritusko. And someone misses you, theyre looking for you too. Asuka is calling and you have to answer the girl and when you do I pray the world will start again. But I dn't know what will happen when everyone leaves this place, we could all be loast forever in a sea of nothingness that would suck. But the last five years…that is not life. It's not fair it is NOT worthwhile its not filled. IT IS NOT COMPLEMENTATION you have to understandwhy I've decided to let it melt away because it's a slashed tendon that won't stop bleeding it just winks at you. I was forced to look at it for years and pretend it didn't make me so sick. But she's looking for you It's finally going to be buried. Maybe we will too because I don't have the knowledge Not ENOUGH TO build our half of the bridge, soo maybe we'll have to leap not make make it and then we'll fall and be buried together forever. I may never see you again and if what happens what I think is going to happen you'll never even see this. I guess I wrote this for myself God do everything for myself except be Ta-chan so THANK YOU for being Ta-chan. For letting me put youto sleep. His cheek was always so hot whe I kissed you to sleep. Thank you. Nobody here could have have benn Ritsuko and definitely not me because I could never be that good not if you gave me all the time of all the lives in all the worlds because otherwise I'd make sure that we ALL got back and finish the job you started o why did you spl

* * *

"You're…good to me. You keep me sane. If you're sick, you won't have to be sick alone-"

"Don't you touch me_. Don't touch me_. Don't touch _her_. Don't move."

Chords of anguish danced in the back of her throat. She breathed tremulously.

But she didn't move.

He watched her like a wounded deer, his fear laid open and gaping. His hand blindly wandered along the wall, prodding, punching it. Then the absence of everything lay uncovered behind him. He backed into it with confusion molding his face before that too sank beneath the sea of shadows.

The door closed.

She stopped shaking.

The pout in her lip diminished.

She wiped the wetness from her eyes before neatly folding her arms beneath her breasts.

She watched the door as the apartment was steeped in silence to which she numbly accepted and shrugged.

"Well…I suppose that could've gone better," was all she got out before there was a shout drawn out into a wiry, pure scream, a gust of conditioned air, and Mana.

She stood off and watched Kirishima assault the 'open' chevron, still stamped with his vaporizing fingerprints.

"Shinji, don't_do_ this…"

The door reopened.

And Mana gaped at the blinkered lighting bay casting a nearby section of the concrete corridor in stuttering shadows, and beyond that the apartment complex freight elevator with its meshing metal mouth.

The door closed.

Mana shook her head but let the motion die out. "He left me…"

"You make it sound so premeditated."

Kirishima whirled.

"YOU! THERE WASN'T SHIT THERE A SECOND AGO! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM?!"

"Me?" Royal blue eyes flitted chastely. "Do you think if I had any control over what he says or does that I would have let him go home so early?"

Mana's anger briefly evaporated as her mouth wrapped around that silent, terrible word.

"Where the heart is," the auburn-haired woman said, brow pitching downward. "Is that…how it goes?"

The sides of Mana's mouth went up with a souring curve as she drew her fist back just as slowly.

Then she dropped it.

"I am _so_ through with you…"

The gossamer hem of Mana's dress corkscrewed as she spun and stalked back through the shadowed hallway.

"Where are you going?" the woman calmly asked as Kirishima paced her.

"I'm going home."

"And you propose to do that how?"

"I propose to get out the same way I got in," snapped Mana.

"And how did you get in?"

"Stop _talking_ to me," snarled Mana.

They were back at the restroom as amusement fluttered in her voice. "Do people always plan these excursions with no identifiable means of transportation? It's true that life experience is no indicator of common sense, isn't it?"

Mana looked at her again. "You want me to say I had help? Fine! I had help, _alright_?"

"Someone powerful."

Mana shrugged irritably. "I don't know. I guess-"

"But they're not here."

"I _know_ that! I fucking _know_."

"They did not or could not follow." The woman gave Mana a half-lidded once over. "You don't seem very powerful to me."

Kirishima could only sneer. "So why can't I save him? Why's it so bad, can you tell me that? If I'm not strong enough, then what've you got to lose if I try?"

"I was only making an observation. I, personally, have nothing to lose. I have nothing."

"What the hell do you mean?!" Mana erupted. "I bet…I bet every weird, _wrong_ thing that's happened to me is _your_ fault, Asuka!"

The woman appraised herself and then looked at Mana with all the warmth and flavor of vanilla ice cream. "Ah…I can see why you'd believe that I'm Asuka."

Mana balked.

The Woman That Was Not Asuka continued, "You shouldn't worry about him. If by save, you had meant sending him back to the Secondary, you've done well enough. You, however, can't go back that way or the way you arrived without your friend."

"That _thing_ is not my friend."

"I only meant friend as a general term for a person from whose association you may have benefited."

"I already _knew_ that, Asuka," Mana huffed. "I'm being difficult."

"That is _not_ who I am."

Mana lapsed into a silence the woman then adopted. They stared though each other before the auburn-haired woman crossed her arms and slipped away from the bathroom door. As she padded serenely towards the kitchen, Mana deflated and followed.

"Mana, was it?" she asked in Asuka's accented nasal soprano. "Do you like to drink root beer, Mana?"

"I…" Kirishima didn't bother to wipe the puzzlement from her face. "I don't _dislike_ it…"

"I'm asking because I'm about to offer you root beer in an effort to placate you."

"Uh…_okay_…" Mana paused in pulling a kitchen chair out for herself. She had the look of someone who had just been struck in the face with a rubber chicken filled with jello. "You know, usually when you're planning to coerce someone, it's not a good idea to let them know when you're actually doing it."

"I'm not doing it, yet."

"Great," said Mana. "You just let me know when you are and I'll shoot myself full of valium to get the ball rolling."

Not Asuka was emptying the bottom of a three-liter bottle into a glossy black mug when she looked back. "Are you being sarcastic?"

Mana rolled her eyes. "Of course not. The suggestion that I'll self-medicate to make this more convenient for you was meant to be taken in the most literal sense possible."

"Are you being sarcastic, now?"

"Just give me the stupid soda."

The woman topped off the mug, brought it over and slid it across the table so that the large embroidered fig leaf faced Mana. Somewhere in Kirishima a rack of drunken giggles suddenly crashed and spilled. Her hostess didn't frown. She didn't smile, either.

"Don't look at me like that," Mana laughed, swiping at her misted, smiling eyes. "It's working, okay? I'm placated. You have any idea how precious you are?"

"No."

"Of course you wouldn't," sighed Mana. "Why would you?"

"I'm afraid the fidelity of the transplant OS drops off appreciably when I'm forced to interact with anyone but Shinji Ikari."

A deft toss and the plastic jug caromed into the trash bin. The woman joined Mana at the table but didn't bother to match the bewildered stare. "I'll admit that it's difficult to even hold a conversation with you, Mana. I would've been more interesting three minutes ago. I could have been twelve people three minutes ago. Right now I'm reminding myself to breathe."

"Because…" Mana processed something behind her darting eyes. "Is that because you weren't expected to interact with anyone else?"

"That's right." The hostess looked up from the styrofoam cup she was rolling along the flats of her palms. "I just remembered something about you."

"I thought you said that you weren't Asuka."

The woman continued, "She always thought that you were too dumb to be an idiot, and I think now I understand what she meant."

"Thanks…I guess…" Mana's mouth tweaked upward. "She's right in a way. At least up to this point I've been smart enough to stay out of my own Guadalcanal."

The eyes were flat and staring.

Mana's mouth tweaked downward. "Oh…well, see, _Kirishima_ was a battlecruiser during World War Two…"

And staring.

"…and she was sunk _at_ the Battle of Guadalcanal..."

And staring.

"…and my surname's Kirishima, so…" She futilely searched the blankness blinking across from her and slowly shook her head, "so you just could not care any less, could you?"

"I don't have enough experience in judging how little I should care about one pointless story relative to another." She paused as something occurred to her. "I'm sorry. I was being rude."

"Asuka's never sorry." Mana held her hand out to keep the consternation from settling on the other woman's face. "I know, okay, _okay_. I get it…but you _are_ wearing her pretty adult face for a reason. Even if all you can do is breathe and serve root beer."

"How is it, by the way?"

Mana brought the mug to her lips and back down before nodding curtly. "It's good. But I took a trip to Okinawa once and I liked it when I went there. I'm not surprised."

The same could not be said of Not Asuka as curiosity splashed vibrantly across her rented canvas. "They actually exist?" The table wobbled as she planted her elbows in its burnished wood and leaned in. "Okinawa? Root beer?"

"Well, the last time I checked they weren't any less real than…" Mana whipped her head around until she nodded at a clock radio in a kitchen corner, "than Sony, or…" On top of the fridge she saw a white cat, cruelly anthropomorphized with cauterized stumps jutting just beneath its grotesquely swollen and mouthless head, its sightless eyes wild with a thousand sable nightmares, "or Sanrio. Pretty accurate for a place that's fake."

The other woman tucked a sour smile away in a dimple and her sinking eyes, but she said nothing.

Mana tiredly explained, "Look, I didn't say that to be cruel. I know better than to just see everything in black or white, but things are either real or they're…_not_. It's how I got here. And the outside hallway. And _you_. Mostly you." Her grey-blue gaze drew past the swell of her breasts. "And there's the little fact that I'm supposed to be about three years and a cup size past this…_this_."

"If you hate the dress so much then why are you wearing it?"

"Please shut up." Rubberized chair studs croaked as Mana pushed away from the table top and stood. Mug in hand, she roamed the small space, curator for a miniature museum of cookery.

"You know that was the day I realized I was a great liar?" She raised a finger to index her point. "Not good. _Great_. You don't understand, I opened that white box and this…doily abortion was staring back at me. And I almost said something too, but there was this _thing_ in Nana's face which was so…desperate.

"I thanked her. Kissed her on her cheek, which I was scared to do because it had started to sink into her face by then. And I wore this and smiled." An empty chuckle. "I mean, I did pirouettes, for God's sake."

A burnt umber lock snuck across Kirishima's face as she stared down into her mug, back into cold, murky memories. "I think that's the easy part for me because I'm all asymmetrical warfare. I get honest and stupid when I know I'm dealing with other liars."

The imposter flashed a low-wattage grin. "Then I suppose you and I have something in common."

That was when Mana looked her squarely in her stunning glass eyes. "Who are you?"

"Autonomous Coercive Template, Responsive Extraction, Supraliminal-Subliminal."

Mana couldn't say anything at first, and then squinted. "Ak…A-ku-tores-u?" she ventured, the transliteration grinding off of her rusty English tongue.

"I've heard that before…" Actress said, but she wasn't looking at Mana. "I heard that when I woke up."

Mana looked around as frustration once more began to concentrate in her pinching brow. "What the hell are you talking about? You mean, when you woke up today?"

"No."

"Yesterday? Help me out here! "

"I've only woken up once and I couldn't tell you what day that was. I don't know."

Mana winced as if shying away from a brutal light. "Don't…don't you get tired?"

"I get very tired." Actress looked Mana off and she sagged. And sagged. "I'm very tired. Is that…abnormal?"

"Uh, _yeah_." Kirishima nodded as her eyebrows climbed high on her face. "I'd say that's something you'd have to ask your boss about. But we're getting off track-"

"I watched Shinji." Mana stopped talking. "And now it makes sense to me, how vital rest is to people. I watched him today, how active he was in the beginning of it. How the hours seemed to grind on him in small increments. He didn't seem to notice. He was used to it. He had been used to it his entire life.

"I noticed. His eyelids coming down and he didn't realize he was struggling against it. I watched. Now I know. He became alert again when he was given an activity. I realized that it doesn't take much. He would get my brush. He would see someone to the front door. He would take out the trash. He would have sex with me. He would wash the dishes. He would close the blinds for the balcony. It doesn't take mu-"

Muddy liquid sheets and ceramic chips exploded at the back of the sink. Actress calmly watched Mana fold over its stainless steel lip and mouth savageries behind her dirty red awning. Her shuddering dampened as the root beer climbed down the back wall like a melting shadow, and she swung up.

"I gotta be honest with you, I'm not feeling very placated right now."

"I can see that."

"Tell me you tricked him."

"Okay," said Actress. "I tricked him."

"There are things I have to know and I swear you better not lie to me, I swear to God."

"I couldn't tell you if I've retained the ability to lie or the incentive, or the ability to discern when I should or should not be lying. I think I understand why you're upset, but threatening me is a waste of your time."

"Oh. Well, then fuck you." Then Mana waved her off then, the smile slashed across her face scar-like in its brutality. She paced the kitchen with caged predatory steps and cupped her outstretched hands to weigh candidate responses and she voted, "Do…do you understand revenge, lady? Why you can't manipulate and brainwash and _take_ people?"

"But you can. Because we did." Actress leaned back and slowly lifted Asuka's full calves. "It's true that I am an invasive agent that supplanted Shinji's own memories with a false set, but I'm only required to comply with a preexisting template."

Actress deployed her legs back to the hardwood floor and sat up. "The final form and content of the false memories relied entirely on his desires, latent or otherwise. Shinji wanted to -how does it go?- to fuck Asuka. She was counting on it."

She primped her folded hands in her cream-colored lap. "And she was right. All I had to do was show him what he had hidden from himself."

"And you wonder why you failed," Mana cut in.

"No I don't." Actress flicked a lidded glance up and down her guest. "It was only because you had intervened. This was despite the fact that Asuka had accounted for the possibility of interference from additional parties." Actress smiled. "It takes exceptional power to breach the walls of the House of Dirac."

Mana's brow traced a sick arch. "You're _proud_ of that…"

"_Asuka_ is proud of that," Actress corrected. "Any pride exhibited by myself is an artifact of hers. I don't care that you've saved him or stopped us, however you define what happened. But if you hadn't arrived, we would have succeeded eventually."

"Wait…" Mana Kirishima stopped at her hostess' side, voice low and guarded, "just how do you define 'succeed eventually'?"

"It depends," Actress claimed. "How long can the human body survive without food and water?"

Two things happened.

First, nothing.

And then Mana shot forward to roughly pull the passive woman to her feet by fistfuls of her wrinkled and ill-fitting jersey. Kirishima jerked back, and they were nose-to-nose.

"Inflicting bodily harm won't help you."

"It'll help you a whole lot _less_."

Actress mulled this over. "I never thought of it that way."

"I don't care!" Mana yelled. "Why do you, why's Asuka trying to kill him?!"

"She's actually trying very hard not to kill Shinji. It's just turning out to be very difficult to remove his tethers and I don't think that is meant literally. He's not actually physically anchored."

"Of _course_ he's not! What are you, _stupid_?"

"Now who sounds like Asuka…?"

In that bare moment Actress had been the vehicle for something wholly perverse and human, and Mana frowned as if the closeness was making her ill. She dumped the fake in the nearest chair. "Make me understand."

"I don't know if I can do that. I'd just be repeating information that was transferred to me during the transplant procedure. It's fragmented and compressed. I think it's incomplete."

"Try. I'll…" Mana gathered something on the floor with her eyes and came back up with it. "I will hurt you if you don't try."

Actress' smooth gaze deburred Mana's frayed edges, but she didn't answer at first. When Mana blinked Actress said, "I assume that Asuka meant eliminating the physical and emotional bonds that have prevented his full integration with the Primary."

She anticipated the question in Mana's stone-set façade. "I offer an allegory: Your life and the air that you breathe, the people that you interact with, are undeniably real to you. You cannot measure what you can't see or what you cannot feel or hear, or what is imperceptible to listening and measuring and seeing machines. You cannot make decisions based on things you are completely unaware of. So they fade into the background. They are Secondary. To Asuka, you are Secondary. To Asuka, your air and your people are Secondary."

"Bullshit." Mana laughed and shook her head to keep the information from settling in. "And you're crazy if you think I'm going to take that from someone who never even bothered to come-"

"-back?" Actress finished. "Perhaps _you_ are the one that never came back." The empty mask briefly shifted with a borrowed smirk. "Haven't you once considered that Asuka could not possibly make me and this place by herself?"

Something made contact very far from Mana's sweet spot, and she shuddered.

"Oh _you're_…" Then she said it again, quieter, until the weight of Actress' words was pressed into her and she could only tear up and gulp down silence. Mana didn't spit it back out until she had joined it with choked noise. "You _are_ lying. You people wouldn't do all this to bring us together."

"You're right. We wouldn't. It's neither an objective nor a probable corollary," said Actress. "Secondary is a term of differentiation and also a statement of priority-"

"Who _cares_?" Mana stumbled over her cobblestone words. "What's it matter to say one place is more important that the other?!"

"Because although the stated objectives were the recovery of Shinji Ikari and his full integration with the Primary, liquidation of the Secondary was determined to be a likely consequence." Pause. "I'm sorr-"

A cry of sick, coherent rage. The chair pitched back on one leg like a toppled tree. Actress reeled from Mana's burst of sound and movement, hiccupping air as she careened backward into the hollow cabinet below the sink.

"I was going to say I was sorry…"

That made Mana search for sorry, but as Actress slowly gathered herself all Kirishima received was an enormous, heartfelt…

…blink.

"You don't even_care_!" Mana wailed. "He was choking that day in the park because you were taking him away! You were trying to _kill_ us!"

"I had nothing to do with the failed direct extraction. That was Asuka. Killing everyone that exists in the Secondary wasn't a stated objective."

"And that's supposed to make me feel _better_? How _in the world_ is that supposed to make me feel better?!"

The imposter's eyes tightened with the ghost of pity. "It's not supposed to make you feel anything."

"Try again." Kirishima drew her forearm across her face with a shaking breath. "You'd make a _wonderful_ human being."

"Thank you."

"GET ME _OUT OF HERE_, YOU OBLIVIOUS, TACTLESS BITCH!"

Actress started to say something, but she caught the wild glint in Mana's eyes, and then caught herself. When she couldn't keep up with the things racing across Mana's face, she lowered her head.

"I understand." And she sagged. "I have to retrieve something, so it'll take a moment."

She didn't look at Mana as she pushed off the counter and wandered toward the kitchen entrance, behind Kirishima. But she stopped. Mana unwound to see what was there between them and the rest of the apartment.

The refrigerator abruptly sputtered off as Mana's even breath caught in her throat.

Because there was a brunette standing in a cyan fuku, and she held up a pistol to the milky bulb on the kitchen ceiling. There were her coal eyes transfixed as ribbons of light slid along the weapon's obsidian finish.

"Never mind," said Actress. "I see it, now."

* * *

As he lay wheezing on his back on the decimated sidewalk, Shinji realized he didn't want to see anymore. But the End filled his nostrils and ears, and washed up like cold vapor to mist the corners of his stinging eyes. He was breathing in the End, choking on deft fingers of smoke and an advected bloody fragrance.

He had woken up on his apartment floor, tasting sleep and stale wet copper. He had remembered.

Then he had run, and that had worked pretty well until his body decided to mutiny. At the moment he had no choice but to take in the fire and billowing black streamers swaying up to the waxy day light.

He remembered again. Tried to move again.

Something plastic popped and smoldered behind a knee-high wall running alongside the boulevard; its firelight and smoke swapped places with acrid frequency, and he had to settle for being reminded of his clock radio faithfully blinking an ignorant time in his kitchen. In his bedroom.

Dead batteries had relegated his cell phone to microchip paperweight status. NHK had been experiencing technical difficulties, while T2BS apologized for its disruption in daily broadcasting service with a bulletin of black kanji and Keiko Matsui.

TV Tokyo-2 had endured a salt-n-pepper squall flashing over to a rapid of faces flowing by on a dark burning street just like this one, and there had been driftwood shrieks which were so happy as they were swept away by a salt-n-pepper squall flashing over to a rapid of faces.

That had been Thursday night, if the date that had been stamped in the anarchic footage was accurate. Today was at least Friday.

Mihiro had touched him on Tuesday.

He had turned the television off after that, bent on not wasting another second orienting himself of curling around his stomach which was overstuffed with hunger. Stepping around the empty denim jeans and the white shirt patterned with sakura blossoms, he had gained all of the clarity he would need.

Mana Kirishima was not the coagulated Orange plastered to his wall. He had abandoned her to the cruelest joke anyone could have ever played on him. Lying in the bathroom of that half place, limp and helpless. In the dark.

He had run. But discounting the chaos that had apparently razed this place while he was playing house, Mihiro still lived on the other side of the city. If Mihiro lived. If there was an _other side of the city_.

There _had_ been, at least four blocks away from home, as he'd sprinted in the shadow of a high rise. His heart was pumping cold blood when he had heard it. Shrill peals of terror and ecstasy. Vile, mingling brews of each. Cascading down the sheer grey precast concrete. He surged past before he was doused and drowned in it.

The sixth block had looked like the ninth looked like the eleventh, and on one of them Misato had covered her face and sobbed. He had tried not to look at her chest which had been a hitching swell of ground chuck.

After that the buildings had grown taller, into steel and glass sleeves that threw shadows over broken shops and burning cars. The conflagrations had spread from the debris-strewn boulevard to his lungs, legs, and arms until his blood wasn't cold. He had slowed down, anyway, just enough to see a caravan of luxury sedans ponied up to the curb of a skyscraping condominium. A part of him had noted that the pearl roof of one sleek Acura was crudely convex, the bowl savaged by crimson smears. A part of him had noted there wasn't any body.

There wasn't anybody.

There were only trampled newspapers and crushed cans. Thrashed shirts and blood-washed jeans wrapped around and pinned beneath rubble. There was only flaming, popping detritus. Papers fluttering down through sunrays like eraser streaks through graphite canyons but Shinji knew they were really confetti to usher in the successful End.

The sounds were here, also. Keening subhuman drizzle too fickle by half to extinguish the fires on any of the streets he had flown then huffed then wheezed by.

And not the street on which he had crumpled when his legs had finally become nerveless rubber stalks. It was all he could do to roll onto his back and shut his eyes away from the perfectly ruined face hovering between him and his soaring steel witnesses.

"I think I get it, Shinji. I'm not good enough. I get it. I do."

He took a ragged whistling breath, and that wasn't good enough to keep that delirium from lyricizing her fractured voice.

"I can't…I can't help that I'm an all or nothing kind of girl. I play to win. I win to live. I think you know I can't just _unlearn_ that. Which is why it annoys the piss out of me that you couldn't find it in yourself to not be a conflict of interest."

Shinji looked.

Her eye clouded over with false calm. Her blood, perfume and plastic filled his nose and pooled in the back of his brain.

He started searching for sounds beyond her.

"But don't feel too bad. I'm here to congratulate you, Shinji. You win. Good game." She shook her head beyond the cage of his fingers. "And not just that, no. I want to show you that I can let go of things, too."

A lull as she sighed poisonously and he heard something turning over, churning pitifully like a lost machine child. Shinji slid out from beneath her and staggered to his prickly feet.

"Oh no!" she demurred. "Don't be gracious in victory on _my_ account, because what's the point of settling for a clean break when you can have a compound fracture, _right_?"

A coupe idled across a broad, empty intersection, its candy apple hood humming in the shattered entrance of the café it had plowed into. Aluminum chairs, tables and umbrellas lay brutalized in its wake.

The driver side door was open.

Shinji made due with a stiff amble. She hadn't moved, but even as he neared the car her words hijacked invisible cords channeled straight into his goddamned inner ear-

"That's what you did. It should be something you can see. Splinters of splinters, Ikari. Just sticking out of me. You'll never see them, now."

He flung a bistro chair by one its gimpy legs and swung down into the plush leather cabin.

The seat was wet. The steering column, dash, the tinted windshield, all varnished in runny amber.

He ignored those things, the cloudy, claustrophobic memory they conjured, and threw the car in reverse. Thank God it wasn't a stick, and he drove in blissful silen-

"You know, you_are_ talking to me. In your own special way."

A slaughterhouse squeal of rubber as they whipped around a ruined corner. Inertia tugged at him but passed over his passenger like she was second-born. Only her eye and mouth moved, and even they were untethered from silly physical tenets.

Until they powered over a hard charcoal lump in the road and in the corner of his eye her plastic guise slipped like a tilted portrait. Eyebrows and iris, sanguine stripes of grime and the pink simpering fault of her lips, all listing and sinking crazily.

_Just fix your face. Why can't you ever fix your da-_

Another scouring of tread as a truck and its cargo bed of fire ghosted by the driver's side window. He checked the sideview mirror, which was no longer there.

"Why couldn't you tell me? How the hell else was I supposed to know you wanted this?" Laughter skittered along her slanted lips. "No one ever told me I was working on outdated information. No one told me…"

Words hung in him for a moment. Then

they shuffled

out

over some fulcrum

and they

came

down.

"Sh…shut up." He swallowed but they came back up. "Shut up."

"I'm _invested_ now, you selfish little boy. Do you understand what you've done?_Everyone's_ invested."

"Fix your face." But she didn't and the glue behind her drifting features was weak and molten.

"Why couldn't you just take _no_ for an answer?"

"I…but I-"

"Why?"

"You treat it like the worst thing, you treat it…"

Shinji took in air that bubbled down his throat like lead that cooled and crushed his diaphragm. His knuckles frosted over the knotted tan wheel, the ridges of cracking bone blurring together. Everything married in a creeping tide of funhouse quartz and only his voice was brittle.

"You treat it like the worst. THING if I leave just a piece of me near you-"

"_WHY?!_"

"Just a part of me!" he cried. "Until I didn't need you anymore, _I just thought it_!"

The grinding engine stole over them like the empty city blending behind her.

"It doesn't really matter, does it? Forget it, Shinji. Can you do that? I think so. You're good at forgetting things."

"Shut up!"

"You forgot yourself with a great deal of help. They're why you won't talk to me."

"I am I _am_! I _am_ talking to-"

And he cut the wheel again to avoid an empty school bus with orange windows as she said, "It must be great."

"_She_ is great and you're helping me kill her!"

"I'll kill her, Shinji."

He couldn't say anything as she set her melting jaw and expounded. "If by some miracle I find my way to you…she'd better not be there."

He bit down on a piecemeal sob and with self-loathing itchy in his throat spoke to scratch it. "She's _not_…" It still itched. "You _did this_!"

"You finally get some heart and you won't even let me see it."

"YOU CAN'T SEE AT _ALL_!" he roared, turning on her and forgetting everything. "YOU'RE NOT EVEN _HERE_! YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO FIX YOUR FA-"

The world got loud and abrupt as Shinji's insides leapt towards his outsides. White flowered out to him as if shot from an explosive pistil. It was like being in a pillow fight with God or a very large chimpanzee.

Either way, he lost.

* * *

"Poor thing," said Yukie. "I've never seen a USP so beat up, before."

She paused and torqued her wrist to see the other side of the dark scarred weapon. "What I want to know is how the hell you scratch up a black oxide finish. It's like they were trying to dig up a fossil…is it yours?"

She was looking at Mana, who shook her head like it was filled with sloshing water.

"Figures." A tweak of Yukie's tight lips. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you don't look like the concealment holster type."

"Who does?" the former spy asked and then swallowed. "But then I'm not the one wearing the middle school uniform."

The brunette cocked a thin chestnut eyebrow. "Ouch! Daddy's little gunsmith cat gets taken down a peg."

"I wasn't trying to."

"Which, of course, makes it okay."

Now Mana's eyes were crawling all over Yukie's pastoral veneer. "Are you _asking_ me?"

"I'm just seeing how much more we have in common."

Mana clipped the remaining words on her tongue and closed her mouth.

Actress did neither.

"It's mine and that's how it's always looked. If the same attention to detail was given to functionality as was to appearance, then it should work, also."

"I was about to say," Yukie laughed, "it doesn't make much sense to have it if you can't even use it."

"I agree," said Actress. "Can you give it to me?"

"Sure." And Yukie beamed.

And she brushed past Mana Kirishima and stepped inside of Actress' outstretched hand. And she lifted her own hand which swept upward and missed the fake's fingers. And the hand with the gun curved high until it was above all of them while Mana's mouth formed an O.

And Actress watched as it all came down on her forehead with a searing crack.

Mana mutely gaped at that sound, the absence of it, and the hollow crash at the hardwood floor until she couldn't look anymore and had to snap to Yukie. "What the hell is wrong with you?!"

The brunette watched Actress coil into herself like a pill bug and gingerly staunch the scarlet tributaries trickling out from beneath her palm.

Yukie said, "_Her_."

"You…" Mana's face was twisted by horrible comprehension. "You don't have any idea what's going on here, do you?"

"I _bleed_…" said Actress.

"You're damn right you bleed." Yukie hissed. She raised the black arm as a lethal extension of her own and aimed it just behind Actress' vacuous eyes. "You can have little pieces carved out everyday until you're all used up. Just like you did with him so that when he got to me he didn't even know how to laugh. So yeah, you bleed, Asuka, and in this…_place_, no one will give a fuck."

"I will." When Yukie didn't spin on her heel and empty her magazine into her chest, Mana continued. "You don't like Asuka. Okay. I understand that much better than you think."

"Don't be so sure about that."

Mana's eyes fluttered at some irritant. "Look, would the real Asuka just let you hit her in the face like that?"

"You know Shinji, don't you?"

And they fluttered. "That should be the _furthest_ thing from your mind right about now-"

"Because you smell like him and he's just all over your childhood." Yukie paused as Actress pitched over on her knees and scraped a low moan from the back of her throat. "Your mom was beautiful, by the way."

"That's not important." Something wet traced a crooked trail down Mana's cheek. "This? It doesn't help us get out of here. Or home. You_blow her away_, and we'll both be stuck here until we die. Do you want that?"

"…I don't know."

"That thing on the floor is just some _pathetic_ copy, you moron!"

"But you're not…"

The muzzle whipped through an arc that terminated at Mana's sternum. Kirishima watched the steady metal slide and then slowly surrendered her hands behind her head.

"So you're really going back to bury that broken little man?" Yukie asked.

"I'm going back because I've got a life outside of him and I deserve the chance to_find it_…okay?"

The smile slowly infected the edges of Yukie's narrowing eyes. "No. Of _course_ it's not. Because stepping all over someone who's lived their whole life with their face in the mud is generally a very _not_ okay thing. _Okay?_"

"You could be talking about me and that's why I regret what I did to Shin-"

"For example,_Mana_, do I _deserve_ to go home or should I be _punished_ for lowering myself like you and all those other selfish tools that fucked him up?!"

"Does a bear shit in the woods? Is that how it goes?"

No sooner had the hazy voice drifted up from the floor did the smile drain from Yukie, the pleasantry whirlpooling away like reason from her eyes as she twisted to shut Actress up once and for all.

Until Mana crashed into her ribs.

Yukie's cry was lost in a clap of packaged thunder. They left their feet as the momentum flung them into the kitchen table and the USP from Yukie's strained grasp. Mana watched it scrape over its reflection before spinning off of the opposite edge…

And she got caught reaching. Her palms squeaked across the mahogany surface as she was roughly pulled off and away from it. She found her feet until something butted up against her heel which made her eyes go cerulean and wide until she slammed back into the refrigerator.

Mana rushed up again until the whiplash caught up with her. She shrank with a leaky hiss, clutching the back of her head as she slid down the rattling white box.

"What's up?" Yukie stalked over, peering out from behind her sweeping chestnut bangs. "I thought you like being on your back, Kirishima. Don't lie."

"Y-you're Yukie."

"Y-you're smart."

Mana pushed up to her hands and knees, away from the maple slats. "I know why you're doing this."

"Listen good, unless you know why I'm wearing this jailbait cosplay, you shouldn't be telling me _anything_."

"I know about Jin." Mana waited. Nothing happened. "I…I don't think he'd want to see you like this, if what Hika-"

Yukie's foot plowed into her ribcage and liberated her of air. Mana curled around her abdomen, gasping asthmatically.

"You know what Jin would want…?" The words were frigid at first, their heat absorbed by the eyes sooted by black wildfire. Which was spreading. "He would want someone to care. Shinji would've cared, he would've and you _ruined_ him. I saw what you did to him, you_liar_."

"We c-can't…stay here..."

"Liar! You're LYING!"

"Look _around_…" Mana began unfolding from the chrysalis of pain. "It's all…stale. Do you hear any neighbors? I bet you couldn't talk to them. Any cars outside? You couldn't drive them. We live outside of this and you know it."

"I know! I _know_ I-I…" Yukie lifted her chin to keep above the rising despair.

Mana looked up at her. The rest poured out.

"BUT NO ONE CARES AND EVERYONE'S PRETENDING AND THEY DON'T. _CARE_ AND I CAN'T DO IT ANYMORE I JUST CAN'T OKAY I _CAN'T_ AND IF YOU'RE SAYING I HAVE TO GO BACK AND LIVE THERE FOR JUST _ONE MORE SECOND_ I'D RATH-"

There was a clap of packaged thunder.

Yukie's head snapped down so that Mana could see the cobbler of tufted hair and blood in the back of it. Then she glanced off Mana's shoulder and crumpled because there was nothing left to hold her up.

Behind her, Actress was lowering the pistol. "I don't think I like being struck in the face."

"So that's it, huh?" Mana was standing as she wrapped an arm around her crooked waist. "That's why you shot her."

"I was showing you the way out."

Mana stood up straight.

They watched each other.

Kirishima shuffled out of the smooth pane of scarlet glass gliding out from beneath Yukie Utsumi and took a bloody step back into the living room.

Actress took a step towards her.

Mana stepped back and Actress took a step towards her.

* * *

He stood before a cyclone of ash waltzing up to him from a white floor. The crooked dervish bulged then fell away like petals from a midnight tulip and she had been in the middle of it. She was reaching to him from across the moat of settling char, but her offer was the tainted color of rust.

Her eyes dropped to the beckoning curl of her stained fingers. "Oh, don't worry," she laughed. "It's not my blood."

Mercurial pellets pooled in some basin in his mind.

It wasn't her blood or his, but sacrifices all in his cursed name because _everyone_ was invested now, you selfish little boy.

In this dream he knew enough of what she had done to say, "Goodbye, Asuka," and turn his back and wake up for the second time that day.

* * *

The black-blue truck rested on its broadside, driveshaft and warped chassis the underbelly of a felled steel beast. But Shinji wasn't interested in those so did not linger, passing the rear run-flat tires spinning madly in place and the bumper whose left corner was obscenely clefted.

He looked back across the street, feeling like he owed the horse he had rode in on, and Shinji had to admit; the half that wasn't a crumpled ruin of metal, plastic and leaking fluid was a really nice car. He had been sitting in the other half, but his neck still hurt and things like having a face made his face feel like one giant bruise.

Shinji seethed when he crouched to look beyond the paddy wagon door, which was laid flat against the scoured asphalt. The interior was stocked with slanted shadows and an aftermath of empty body armor, shoulder pads and gauntlets, headless helmets with tinted visors. And as he approached the toppled roof his fingers bit savagely into his grimy palm.

Someone drove the damn truck. It didn't shift gears or accelerate or hurl itself through the abandoned business ward because it just felt like it.

"There's a curfew, you know."

Asuka hadn't said that. Shinji looked up, and she wasn't sitting on the riveted edge of the roofline. Her legs weren't dangling over the bold white letters stenciled along the navy finish. She wasn't Kaworu.

A number of choice words sprang to Shinji's mind when he looked at the wreckage he'd crawled out from. 'Survivable' was not one of them.

"Why did you save me?"

The seraphic laughter in his bloody eyes was sharing the space. Was that why he wasn't smiling?

"The soldiers that drove this truck were JGSDF. They'd been ordered into the city to support the Tokyo-3 riot police, who'd finally been overwhelmed and could not enforce the martial law that had been authorized. They had been flown in directly from joint exercises with the Middle Army after having been directed midair and inadequately briefed."

"Can't you just answer my question?"

"The soldiers wore reinforced helmets, steel-toed boots, and wrist guards. They had shields. Employed Janweija Sick Sticks and thought they were immune. They could not know there was only one true armor. They're not like you and I-"

"_Kaworu_."

His eyes resurfaced and fell on Shinji. "I am doing as poorly as I can to keep a promise. Technicalities are the height of the Lilum culture. Wouldn't you agree, Shinji Ikari?"

_You're not doing this to me, again_. "If…if you're going to talk in_riddles_, I guess I can't do anything about that. But it doesn't help me understand what you want from me."

Kaworu considered this at length. When he spoke again his airy melody was oddly heavy with what Shinji thought might have been the truth. "I want your happiness. I want you to live here. I want you to immerse your heart and realize that which you'd abandon like a troublesome dream we wake and live and die in."

"Would _you_ die?"

"I am at your mercy." Mercy was underlined and a mile high. **MERCY**. "We all are. Isn't that enough?"

"I never asked anyone to be at my mercy."

"_But we are_."

"If you want me to, I can die with them. And that's about it. After I'm finished with what I'm doing here, kill me, if it'll make you feel any better."

"This is not about _me_." Kaworu started honing his words like cold shivs. "This is hardly about _you_, this is about the people you would leave to the darkness."

"I won't tell them to find their own light." Shinji shrugged off the voice whispering that he and the Angel should be switching arguments. "I won't tell them anything."

"You don't _have_ to tell them anything! All you have to do is _be here_ and _like_ it!"

Kaworu changed after he had said it..._yelled_ it. Disdain or envy, or maybe it was malice was three sizes too small for him, which was probably why he shucked it off. And laughed. Mortality bubbled into the sound, warped it. He opened his eyes, and to Shinji they were a bit clearer.

"I feel better, now."

"Are you mad that I popped off your head? I always wanted to ask."

"Perhaps." The truth was there again, on his shoulders this time, and he finally shirked it off. "Yes. It hurt. I had to remind myself that I offered you the choice. And it's still your choice, but if you truly think yourself incapable of the things I've just asked of you, then you are a fool."

"Probably." Shinji smelled pyre smoke on the dead wind. He turned into and breathed it in. "Thanks. For saving me."

"It wasn't for your sake."

"Good." Shinji lurched forward and stifled a hiss for his own benefit more than anything else. He still had some ways to-

"She did not know…"

Shinji stopped.

"You must understand…she was a future you could live for. If I hadn't used the opportunity…"

"But you did." Then Shinji nodded to himself and sighed through his nose.

When Kaworu saw this, he dipped his head between his coat rack shoulders. "You cannot ask me to save her…"

"I wasn't going to."

This was over.

As Shinji straggled off, a child's laughter drifted with the smoke on the back of a summer breeze. Something, someone, choked it off.

* * *

"Wait. No. Wait. Stop. I can't do this. Don't do this. Stop. _Stop_. This means stop. Don't. Wait. Listen to me. _Wait_. I'm sorry I pushed you I was mad okay you made me-STOP. STOP. Hold my hand. You did this to me you put your fingers in my head and did this. Can I get a do over. YOU DID THIS. Take my hand. I'm through because of YOU. Don't let go of my hand. She's really going to do this. Don't look. She won't stop. Don't let go don't look. Will it hurt. Don't look. Will it hurt will it hurt WILL IT HURT. Let's find out together," said Mihiro.

* * *

The Kamakura's neighborhood didn't seem real to Shinji. Dark dwellings rose over the vegetable soup dusk like uptown dollhouses daddy wouldn't people because he'd have to shell out the extra ten-thousand yen. Maybe the surrealism was aided by the hunger that plagued him. Nothing about today should have been real.

As it were, Shinji solemnly crunched his way up the Kamakura's rose quartz driveway. He slowed when he realized it was entirely empty.

And finally, the thought that had chased him down his apartment's piss-permeated stairwell was all kinds of heavy.

FULL STOP.

Mihiro might not be here. What if she's _just not home_? Wandering the bones of the city, like him? Lost in _it_ or her mind or crushed by the gravity of it all?

_She blamed herself. She couldn't even look at me…_

Shinji had dismissed these reasonable things because he had been so determined to just _do something_. But now he faced the stone façade of her home and the ghost of his reflection in the front bay window. Beyond that haggard, translucent man, the interior was a sliver of darkness between pearl curtains.

There was no where else to go. Nothing else to do when not even her father seemed to care that she could bend words and numbers, sounds into art. That she'd had a boyfriend and had been dumped only after she had tried to have Shinta tongue and feel up and deflower her.

Shinji tried to stop himself but the transference was completely involuntary…and light speed. He didn't even know the man. He'd never even met the mother, but Ikari couldn't bring himself to condemn her, too. Perhaps because in a great number of ways -ways that counted- Shinji had never met his own.

Not everyone's nuclear family eventually melted down. Look at the Horakis. The Suzaharas before he had wiped them out. Mister Kamakura had stood his daughter up at her cello recital, had copped out on at least half a dozen other double pinkie promises that Shinji could recall. That only meant he had to be there to sell those lemons.

He had _been_ there. They lived in the same house, ate from the same table, sat in the same leather seats in the same damn car when _he_ drove her spoiled ass to school.

Mister Kamakura would remember her birthday and know what her scream sounded like as it hurtled through the drywall, stone and glass that Shinji flew by as he exploded to the front door.

The key twittered on his cat's cradling fingers before it scraped into the deadbolt, and he _twisted_.

There was a brittle snap; it had been a cheap brass copy belonging to her former instructor and he was Shinji Ikari, so it broke.

Desperation and a newfound hatred for doors lined up behind the shoulder he drove into the red wood veneer. The bolt slipped from the doorframe and deposited him onto the foyer as the portal slammed open.

The world capsized as Shinji jumped to his feet, but he crushed his eyes away to right the hallway and the shaded rooms branching off from it, the stair case to his right chasing up to the second floor.

Ikari closed the door to seal off the red light dusting the entrance, a waning evil. He was wasting a moment in the near dark trying to hear where the sound had come from when it leaked out again. It was different, this time.

She was crying.

And he was trundling up the stairs, sputtering at the top landing as a charlie horse scrambled up his left calf. The outline of six or seven doors rose from out the darkness, but only one had a luminous red rim that scraped the carpet beneath its sill like, like…toys?

Where was that from?

As Shinji wandered in, he didn't see her at first. He surveyed the bed or maybe it was a well-kempt rat's nest; then he inspected the ripped sheets and stained pillows spilling over the mattresses pulled halfway off the frame; the valley of books with shattered spines and magazines, the snarled layers of socks and pleated skirts, crumpled windbreakers and training bras; the gutted dresser, a toppled monument to an ousted despot with his bullshit propaganda half ripped from her walls. All imprisoned by the hellish dusk streaming through the vertical window blinds.

She was staring at him from below them. Her old, quavering eyes, her matted black bangs, they belonged in here.

"Mihiro…" He tasted phlegm. Unwashed flesh. "Just…whatever you do, _please_ don't make me run…"

She blinked at him.

"Mihiro…?"

The girl lifted a damp palm up to her forehead like some Lilliputian slave. She came away with nothing, which she scrutinized.

"Are you okay?"

"She…she shot…"

"_What?_" Shinji started wading through her bedroom mire.

Her breath was coming in urgent, puttering bursts. "D-don't…"

"Mihiro, what hap-" He had to catch himself as something hidden clipped him. When he looked back up it was just him and the fluttering blinds.

And someone was pounding down the stairs.

_How is she doing this?_

"Mihiro!"

By the time Shinji had reached the top landing she was already opening the front door. Trying to. Mihiro lost her grip and sprawled backwards in a flustered heap.

"I have to know something! _Please!_"

She flailed upright, scampering back into the first floor and out of view. Shinji caught dirt smudges, tear streaks and rampant dread in a spare sunbeam before he staggered down after her. He didn't feel like chasing anyone that didn't want to be caught, but he couldn't leave her alone just yet, not in this empty crippled home.

It mattered little how small Mihiro was or where she was hiding, not with her broken, scattered breathing. After a minute, Shinji traced it to a room with a sepia leather couch wrapped around the edges of its sunken floor. An enormous plasma television clung to the far wall above a fire mantel while amber twilight filtered through the curtains; all the world was a candle lit egg yolk.

"You know I can't leave until you talk to me…don't you?"

Shinji didn't know how long he stood there at the edge of the room, a tired and famished invader.

_Worst. Viking. Ever._

Until the fireplace door creaked open to surrender a reluctant sooty arm, then a foot, and Mihiro was shaking beneath the marble ledge.

This was a start. Okay. Shinji just hoped his smile didn't look as plastic as it felt as he stepped down onto the Berber carp-

"DON'T HURT ME!"

The air around her pulsed.

Then it detonated over the walls and shivering window panes in breaking waves, stopping just short of crushing him beneath the depth of her fear. It was hard staying smart enough to mend his piecemeal thoughts or even to see her through the rippling distortion. The concussing pressure was starting to recede and he could hear things again, but even so…

_What can I possibly say to her? I don't know what to say…_

Mihiro did.

"I don't know how to bring her back…I don't know how to do _anything_…" She choked something back but when she read something hateful in her grubby palms she let it go. "_I can't even turn this stupid thing off!_"

Shinji ignored the part of himself that atrophied. "It's okay."

"It's _okay_?" Her eyes became the smoldering orbs of an untempered sage. "You know I did this, don't you?"

"Yes."

"When I took you away?"

"Yes…I'm not going to hurt you…"

"You're the keystone here, Ikari. _Everywhere_."

"I know."

Her baby face screwed up beyond the simmering bulwark before she buried it behind her knees. "I did ALL of this. They're never coming back and it's_all my fault_!"

"No it's not."

"Get the fuck out of here! You don't think I know you better than you know yourself? What makes you think you can ever lie to _me_, Ikari?!"

"Nothing."

Mihiro looked up. Between them the barrier shuddered like the rainbow-Jovian tempest on a thinning soap bubble, and when he defeated her with her own hysterical logic…it popped.

She blinked vapidly before seeming to realize that just the furniture, trampled by her vanquished ego, stood between them. She rose on ramen noodle legs and shook her head at him, which likely freed the last of her resolve and was why she swooned.

He surged forward to grasp a wiry forearm as Mihiro recovered and wrenched and bristled.

"_No!_"

Her hand whipped around, cracked him in the cheek and broke skin before he seized it. Mihiro didn't think to kick, bite or spit in this reduced state of flailing fight or flight.

Just say things.

"SHE SHOT US IN MY HEAD, SHE BLEW OUR _BRAINS_ _OUT_!"

Shinji had the stupid thought of asking what she'd meant before she abruptly reversed course and launched herself into him. He wasn't keen on letting her arms go, but the girl only reached up to wreathe his neck. He was leaning over slightly to accommodate her as she said something stifled by her own wet sobs in his tortured shirt. Shinji felt the squalling pulse of them slow against his stomach before they petered out in a somber breeze.

She got heavy. What had first been token rage was a gram short of critical mass by the time she'd unconsciously tightened the noose around his collar and whimpered.

He hooked his arm behind her knees to collect her, and nearly dropped her like a clan name; her legs and lolling head spilled awkwardly over the crooks of his elbows and he was Shinji Ikari, so she was heavy. She was heavier with every step so that he had to stop and catch his breath on the third riser up to the second floor. The fifth riser. The sixth. The sixth.

By then, Mihiro's fire-ashen face had twisted into a charred Rorschach's Blot; it was a ninja butterfly riding a Sumatran Elephant that had commandeered a turtle. Who was a ninja.

He was walking pregnantly back to her quarters until he recalled that HOVELICIOUS was an exceedingly kind, if not downright irresponsible, descriptor. So Shinji backed into a room whose door had been ajar at the dim end of the corridor. Mindful of her head, he turned and gazed into the vacant space, marveling at the perfect, antiseptic order. Then he sneered at the perfect, antiseptic order.

This was her father's room.

She murmured sullenly as he lowered her onto the bed. Maybe a bad dream, being jostled, or the -snicker- support from the concrete slab impersonating a king-sized mattress. Probably the third. Everything about the room had a hard, clockwork splendor. A razor must've been used the crease the made bed sheets. Just looking at Mister Kamakura's cherry-black wardrobe and work desk dirtied them; Shinji was passing judgment even as he rolled the bastard's leather desk chair over to the bed, as he sank into and sullied it.

This had to stop.

It was just that it took so little effort for him to square-peg every single coincidence; the shape or size of them hadn't mattered for years. Bemoaning the lack of photographs on the walls or tabletops wouldn't change the fact that some people were satisfied with keeping everything in their hearts. It wasn't like _he_ had any pictures of Mana…

The glow from outside soaked one shaded window off to the side of the cedar headboard. The square twilight wasn't strong enough to breach the frame of the indigo walls but Shinji swiveled away, just in case Mihiro was on the verge of wakefulness.

If she saw him crying, he'd never hear the end of it.

* * *

"What're you doing in here?"

"Oh, I'm just looking for something of yours that I happen to need."

"Wrong answer. I'm ready to get on with the rest of my life, and so is everyone else here who is sick of wasting their careers and our resources on what was at best a futile money pit of a pipe dream to begin with. We tried, okay? Misato and I really tried for both of you."

"Did you fail for us, too?"

"It happens. And guess what? That's all you're going to get."

"I disagree."

"Fine. Go to Central Dogma. Go ahead. Look out over that command bridge. You won't see any soldiers, and that's because there is no war. There aren't any enemies. Nobody else is going to sacrifice themselves for you."

"Rei doesn't count, and you know it. She volunteered, anyway."

"I don't care-"

"It almost_worked_."

"_Almost_ is not an absolute! _There are more Reis_ and _there are no Reis_,_are_ absolutes. _No one else has the power to reach the Secondary_, and _there are no more S2 organs in the world_ are colossal, insurmountable absolutes."

"…I know that it's over…"

"I'm sorry. I really am. But I don't owe you anything else. Please. Leave my office."

"Doctor Akagi…do you think I'll ever see him, again?"

"I hope you do. But I'm smart enough to not give you a straight answer."

"Maybe you weren't smart enough to begin with."

"I don't have to _take this_, Asu…what're you doing with that chair?"

* * *

Nurse Sayuri Ogawa put on a practiced, platonic smile, and began.

"And if you would please turn to your right, you will see a collection of works by Shinji Ikari. These pieces were of course individually crafted but since their conception and arrival here at Nerv Cranial they've become known collectively as the 'Wall of Vitals'. Despite the universality of this umbrella term, the uniqueness of each artifact cannot be overstated, and is perhaps most evident in the contrast between _EEG_ and _Psychograph_, paradoxically the most similar works.

"While both are, to varying degrees, methods of quantifying mental, emotional and physiological wellbeing, _EEG_ measures electrical activity of the brain. _Psychograph_, on the other hand, is more suited to graphically illustrating the relative strength of an individual's personality traits."

Sayuri eyeballed the full side of the suite dedicated to medical imaging for a little longer; the imbedded plasma screens of metered, chirping vacillations, serial cutaways of meat and bone and brain.

"Now, look closely at _EEG_, at the decomposition of the brain waves, and you'll notice a second set which is subservient to the principal array. This is highly characteristic of Ikari's early 'Wet Dream' period.

"The question, then, is how to evaluate Ikari's 'Wall', and the answer is quite literally inherent in the design of _Cardiograph_, _CT_,_Intra_-_Cranial_ _Pressure_, _Psychograph_, and the like. How does a man who's been unable to speak for five years communicate with the world beyond his damaged brain?"

Sayuri's upturned palm swept out as if the plate of hor d'oeuvres atop of it existed. "_This_ is how. They're portraits etched in high-resolution displays. Or perhaps an autobiography translated from scrawling lights and rhythmic pulses. These biometrics are certainly a pale substitute for Ikari's words or a legacy of friendship and laughter, but for now-"

Sayuri fell out of character as the buzzer grated through the hospital suite. She huffed loudly, circumnavigating the Smartbed to answer the door as she allowed her gentle, round features to briefly darken beneath the cast of a drifting cloud.

Sayuri took a long sideways stare at the sinuating lines of neurological activity, and then bumped a blinking gray box next to the door with a small bulge in her hip. When the door slid open with a high motorized peal her maroon eyes fluttered up and down the two tall men peering suspiciously into the room.

"What're you dicks still doing here?" Sayuri groaned.

"Why don't you ask Doctor Marshall?" said the one with hair like short, brown bristles. He frowned back at her while the other man looked past Sayuri. "Like I don't have anything better to do than stand here all day and listen to you talk to yourself."

"_Shinji_, Takeda. I'm talking to Shinji."

"Same difference. Just don't let Sub-Commander Crazy catch you striking up a conversation with her man. Right, Shobu?"

"Yeah," muttered the other man, taller than Takeda with his navy hair slicked away from his long, gaunt face.

Sayuri scoffed. "Just because you're all scared to death of her doesn't mean I have to be."

"Afraid doesn't have a thing to do with it," Takeda warned, smirking jauntily. "You get any comfier with him and you're going to find yourself at the Third Branch, like Shou."

"Yeah," said Shobu.

"_Shou_," Sayuri pointed at Takeda while Shobu folded his arms and yawned, "got packed to Germany because he was a class-A pervert who couldn't keep his hands to himself. I touch Shinji because it's my job. See the difference?"

"Yeah, but I don't think _she_ does. _See the difference?_"

"Then she can come here and sponge him down herself, and it's as simple as that." She waved her hand between them. "You two can help when you're finished soaping each other up."

Takeda looked at Shobu. "You're catching."

"Yeah," said Shobu, then his eyes flashed with understanding. And concern. "What?"

She rolled her eyes and slapped at the wall. The door sighed shut in their faces.

Sayuri turned to scrutinize the other occupants of the room; the three metal chairs beneath a set of pleated beige curtains; the television anchored to the pale ceiling and tuned in to The Static Channel; the sun-bleached reproductions of walled Japanese murals; the heavy door that divorced the main suite from its modest medical supply room and toilet; the dwarf refrigerator squatting stubbornly beneath the bowed legs of an ironing board, and the fat-bottomed corduroy recliner next to them.

And then Shinji Ikari.

"Well, I don't hear _you_ coming up with ways to pass the time," Sayuri sighed, slumping heavily. "Do you even care how long I practiced that speech in the mirror?"

A scale-down city block of diagnostic machinery crowded Shinji's Smartbed. The vein of his gastric feeding tube snaked across the starched custard sheet pulled tight against him up to mid-chest. Plastic tubes suckled at his thin arms while he breathed, smelled of triclosan and linen, and that was about it.

"Alright,_alright_. Relax." She raised a pacifying hand to him and paused for half a beat. "Oh, of _course_ not…look, no one's_mad_. I even got you a present, see?"

Sayuri picked up a pillow from a padded chair and played it like a feather-down accordion before ministering to him.

"Here ya go…" Her fingers stretched through the dark cropped hair she washed and combed daily, between the hard plastic nodes strategically posted across the back of his skull. Shinji slept in the V of Sayuri's forearm and the cranberry trim of her short polyester sleeve. She hosted a thin frown.

"I don't blame you," she intimated in a clipped hush. "I wouldn't wake up either if it meant putting up with that crazy bitch..."

Then she yawned.

* * *

Andre Marshall watched as Major Hyuga volleyed each of Misato Katsuragi's orders with a solemn, mechanical nod. The doctor pulled back and hazarded a glance away from the split screen monitor as the video feed briefly reduced his superiors to a mosaic of flesh-colored tiles.

Nerv Medical staff of varying rank and occupation swam past the wired glass of his office window. They either stopped to collect dockets or deliver them to the front desk across the way. Or they were dutifully lost in their digital clipboards as they bused themselves down the long main hall, their white coattails and black hair billowing as they sashayed out of view-

"_Doctor_."

He snapped back from the coiled tension in Commander Katsuragi's voice as Hyuga ceded his half of the screen.

"Having fun, yet?" she smiled.

Andre threw his arms up with an effacing smirk as Katsuragi expanded to fill the vacuum, and returned the look. "I love my job," he yawned. "Too bad this doesn't have a damn thing to do with it."

"Or maybe you'll get a chance to save more people than you could possibly imagine."

"That's a sick, selfish fantasy of mine, Misato, and you've no idea how grateful I'd be if you were to help me see it to fruition."

"I'll do what I can."

Doctor Marshall gave up his hands to the crown of his head and sobered, as did Katsuragi as she began. "Alright…The Magi put Sohryu either on level six or below level thirteen. Six, most likely. Now that discrepancy comes from the closing of the bulkheads, so either she went down through seven nine-meter stories in a fraction of a second or she's stuck on the sixth floor."

"She could be caught in between," he pointed out.

"Then we'd be home free. We had halothane pumped into those sections."

He gave a small shake of his head and slowly blinked his tacky eyelids. "Wouldn't put my house on that, though."

"I wouldn't put your house on that, either," she admitted. "Now, as chief medical officer in HQ, you have the authority to relieve any personnel you deem unfit for duty."

"Was there a promotion I didn't know about? What about Ritusko?"

"We can't seem to locate her at the moment. You help us get out of this, you _will_ be getting a raise."

"But still…" Doctor Marshall blew a breath out between his flapping lips like a deflating balloon. "What in the world makes you think she's going to listen to anything I have to say? You're practically her mother and look how much that's helped you."

"I'm just using every advantage that we have in a dire situation, Doctor."

"Not every advantage," he yawned.

"Let it go, Mulder." Something severe flashed across her face before she could reset herself. "You don't need to know anything special. All I want you to do is let your staff know that she's not supposed to be down there. Section Two is on their way."

"One flight of stairs at a time."

"The elevators don't run on Murphey's Law," she reminded. "They're not going to work for her, either. Just make sure your staff is informed."

"I've done you one better. I've had two orderlies posted in front of his room since ACTRESS failed. Nurse Ogawa is _in_ the room. I'd do you_two_ better…" He stared through the monitor and Misato's flickering frown.

"Andre…?"

"…and seal us off from the rest of HQ," he suddenly restarted, "but we can't seem to initiate the system-wide quarantine. And we can't use the EPO to restart nonessential systems or bring the elevators back online. Even if they did work they'd just send you back up to the first floor. And MedNet is down. Why _is_ that, Commander?"

"We don't know yet and that's not your problem to solve," she declared. "In a few minutes we'll have personnel down there that know something about crisis management."

"Please, there's over twelve-thousand total hours of E.R. experience between my people. We _are_ crisis managers. We are not, however, clairvoyants. What the hell is going to happen if she gets to the Third Child?"

"I just told you a minute ago, Andre. You really should've been paying more attention."

"You're sure? I noticed that Hyuga was about to shit himself."

Misato nodded her acknowledgement. "Good for you."

"And we can't use the EPO to restart nonessential systems or bring the elevators back online. Even if they did work they'd just send you back up to the first floor. And MedNet is down. Why _is_ that, Commander?"

The metal in Katsuragi's spine began to crystallize and she stiffened. "You…just said that…" She squinted warily at him, measuring his heavy grey eyes. "Are you alright?"

"No..."

"When was the last time you slept?"

"Isosceles…"

"..._what?_"

"I'll be blunt, Commander," Andre Marshall arched far back in his cushioned desk chair and smiled drowsily, "this 'need to know' bullshit is getting old. Especially when you act like I don't need to know_anything_. Give me a reason to take all this seriously…"

"I don't think that it'll do any good to tell you with the way you're acting."

"I'll be the judge of that, Pythagoras…" And then he fell out of his chair.

For the next ten minutes, lots of people in Nerv Medical fell out of their chairs.

Had they been lucky enough to have been sitting.

* * *

"Sayuriiiiiiiiii..." slurred Sayuri.

She lifted her head a full centimeter off the floor before her cheek dropped back into the pool of saliva and spit-distilled blood issuing from her mouth.

"...wish you were here..."

She dragged a low, long croak out of her mouth before consciousness sieved out of her again.

* * *

"-ow, you_are_ talking to me. In your own special way."

Sayuri shuddered. Rolled away from the puddle of cold drool, coughing with great, whooping gulps of air, then whimpered. She brought a rusty arm across her face to block out the high noon ceiling lamps, and cried herself into oblivion as her eyes rolled up into her skull.

"-ver see them n-"

* * *

"_WHY?!_"

She threw her eyes open.

Sayuri kick-started with a feral snarl and wheeled onto her stomach. She surged towards a steel chair beneath the window in a modified army crawl, gathering her elbows onto the thin burgundy padding. Sayuri sneered, lifted her dead weight until her torso was sprawled across the seat, smirked triumphantly,

* * *

"You finally get some heart and you won't even let me see it."

and woke up.

Sayuri blinked slowly, then feverishly as she refused to be shuttered off. She sent her eyes to different shapes, new lights with each exposure, and they picked up speed. She brought her right leg and then her left underneath her as they came back online, storing them against the rubber hoof of the chair leg with unwavering sloth. The woman righted her head, which had settled like a toppled boulder in the nest of her folded arms. She blanched at the taste of ass-worn vinyl and blood, and was suddenly more awake then than she had been in the last fifteen minutes.

Sayuri rediscovered her hand, and hesitation, the will to touch her fingers to her cheek, and finally the need to recoil as if the flesh was on fire.

"Must've been quite the fall."

Sayuri followed the thin, low words, catching something tall, white and black and peach at the side of Shinji's bed. It stopped talking. It shifted and Sayuri didn't blink at all.

Sayuri's left leg was unaware that she was trying to stand and she toppled sideways with a panicked gasp. Her palm slammed into the aluminum sill before the glass could knock her out again.

"Shiesse, Ogawa! You're a nurse, not an oak tree! Get your shit together!"

Sayuri did. When she pushed off of the sill she managed to stand and sway upright.

"Good girl. Don't tell anyone I said this, but I like to see you do well. You took such good care of him, Sayuri. I almost feel bad that I'm relieving you of duty."

Ogawa looked at the white-black-peach shape again. This time, she saw.

"Wh...where're..." The wrinkled words crawled back down Sayuri's throat.

"Take your time...you have all the time in the world, so take it."

Nurse Ogawa only took a minute. "Where's Takeda...?"

"I relieved him of duty. He's big, and not just for a Japanese dude. But halothane makes you small and reasonable."

"...Shobu?"

"I relieved him too, and at the cost of dramatic tension, Sayuri, I relieved every damned man, woman, and German Shepherd within five floors of us."

"Doctor Marshall...?"

The other woman -because that was what she was- could only tilt her head and look nonplussed. "Don't you want to ask me about my hair?" She spooled a jet black ringlet around the crook of her little finger. "I think it's a pretty good job, considering I had about thirty minutes to do it all myself."

Sayuri wasn't looking at the hair. The intruder examined the hem of her lab coat before letting it fall back around her hips. "Oh, don't worry," she laughed. "It's not my blood."

"I-I don't...I..." She waited while Sayuri fastened her tongue. "I'm sorry, Commander Sohryu...I-I don't think that you're supposed to be in here..."

The eyes behind the oval frames were patient and royal blue. "Why?"

"I just...I heard things. And-"

"From who? Who, Sayuri?"

Ogawa opened her mouth, which went slack. "I don't remember..."

"Oh." Sohryu nodded. "It's just as well. I was asking because that's technically information reconnaissance, which is way above your pay grade. People who're smart enough to piece secrets together should also be smart enough to keep them to themselves, wouldn't you agree?"

"Yes. Yes, Ma'am."

Sohryu shook her head. "But you're not that smart, are you?"

"Ma'am...?"

"No. You're not." Sohryu began to coarsen. "And I know because you've worked here with Marshall for two years, feeding him updates, giving him urine samples, EEG data files, cardiographs for _two__years_, and if you didn't notice the change in Shinji yourself, you've gleaned half a dozen times today from people who've been in and out of this miserable room. But let's pretend for a second that you don't know what's going down. What do _you_ think it was closing in on the back of your tiny mind? What did it feel like, Sayuri?"

"Commander, I really don't know what you're talk-"

"What did it feel like, Sayuri?"

Sayuri's eyes scraped the ceiling before they crawled back to the half-dead man between them. "...it felt like he wasn't coming back. Shinji's never going to wake up."

Sohryu's lupine smile exposed gleaming ivory canines. "See what happens when you apply yourself?" She wagged a finger at Sayuri. "You should've done more of that, Ogawa. Did you think that you could slump after you got out of school, that we'd let you hit your glass ceiling in some cellar-dwelling government slog?"

"Being a nurse here isn't a government slog-"

"But this is_Nerv_, Ogawa. We're _upwardly_ _mobile_. Read the goddamn mission statement. People don't waste two years as nurses here because they're too busy becoming doctors. Major Hyuga is twenty nine. Commander Katsuragi -Gott bless her defeatist, gin-pickled heart- she's just thirty-four. You're six years older than _me_ and that brig-bunny Suzahara. Fuck half a decade, Sayuri, where do you see yourself in five _minutes_?"

"W-why..." Sayuri's voice cracked under the strain of professionalism. "Why are you saying these things to me...?"

"Because, _nurse_, I'm going to do for you what years of college and shitty resume workshops couldn't, which is make you special. _You're_ the one that doesn't belong in here. You've been given every chance to be somewhere else, and what did you do? Nothing. So now you can just stand there and watch."

Sayuri jumped, now fully awake from the scene playing out in front of her and the resounding, desperate beat being drummed out on the other side of the automated door, where there was yelling.

"Don't worry about them," and as Ogawa looked back, Sohryu waved a handheld display glowing with three boxes arranged in a loose trefoil. They wavered between lime green and emergency red. Sohryu grinned. "I told you. You're special."

"Don't hurt him…please?" Sayuri's jaw muscles momentarily bulged. "He…he's just _lying_ there…he's helpless."

And for her troubles, the nurse earned a look reserved for exceptionally intelligent species of chalk.

"You stupid noob in stockings, is that what you think? When are you going to realize that you've been caring for a one-way mirror? He's _not_ helpless, Sayuri. He's always been making decisions, always had choices. He couldn't convince me otherwise back when he could actually speak to me, so what makes you think that _you_ can convince me, now?!"

Sayuri was reeling. "I'm not…_nothing_…"

"Then look at him…_LOOK_!" Ogawa flinched out of her stupor and did what she was told. Sohryu still waged her eyes on her. "I promise that all you'll ever see is the reflection of the total worth that Shinji Ikari has assigned to _us_. And you can watch that empty shell until your eyes shrivel up like prunes, you can talk to it for years on end, when _everyone_ except for _you_ has given up, and you still won't be good enough!"

The pounding on the door doubled, tripled in intensity. "Don't hurt him," said Sayuri.

"But it's _us_ that _he's_ been hurting." The false brunette thumped her breastbone. "_Us_. I've had it. I won't let him do it, anymore."

"I won't let you hurt him."

"Oh, I know you wouldn't, Sayuri." Sohryu lazily raised a hand with the PDA as if testifying to Sayuri's gathering resolve. Her thumb made small circles over the touchscreen. "You'd take a bullet for someone when they had a howitzer pointed at them."

"What does that mean…?"

"It means that I really don't see how you're going to keep the potassium chloride I injected into him from stopping his heart."

Sayuri stood and blinked at what she'd been told.

Sohryu pressed a button. The medical imaging leisurely calligraphing Shinji's life story frittered away and the flame of them snuffed out, leaving the wall a de-energized black.

They all exploded back in seismographic seizuring lines, winding, vagrant trails that chased and escaped one snaggletooth apex after another, and then did not.

The wall went black again. It stayed that way.

"It's not your fault, Sayuri." Sohryu's eyebrows knitted sympathetically. "You wanted him to do well. You wanted him to get better. To talk to you. To understand you because, well, you deserve it. Anyone who invested that much time and care in him deserves that. Wanting to save him is natural because you know in your heart that he'd want to be saved. And you could've, had you known what I was planning, had dextrose and insulin or calcium chloride on hand to counteract the potassium overdose."

Sayuri stood and blinked at what she'd been told.

"But that's it, isn't it? When it comes down to it, you just didn't have enough information. For example, I lied. You don't have any time left at all. No one here does. You were cut out of the loop before you had a clue there even was one." The pity stored up in Sohryu's pinching brow melted down into feverish, quixotic glee. "Welcome to my world."

Her smile warped and ruptured. She was orange, a cascade of thrashing liquid sheets emptying out onto the birch-patterned floor. Tides of her raced beneath the bed to dash themselves against the shores of Sayuri's nursing clogs. What didn't soak Ogawa's crumpled skirt and tunic stretched out into crude runnels.

The halls outside of Shinji's lovely suite went quiet. The world went quiet.

* * *

The sensation of having his heart stop was as real and completely inaccessible as the murder of a first memory, and was why Shinji woke up the third time that day. As he blinked away germinal sleep, the feeling disintegrated like all dreams rent by the tension of the real world.

"Why did you bring me in here?"

Mihiro's voice was grainy from disuse. Shinji could just make out the marble of her half-shuttered eyes, so he looked there. "I was going to put you back in your room, but I don't think that would've been…safe."

"I hate this place."

"Well, I'm sorry, okay? If I knew, we would've just stayed down stairs. I _did_ have to carry you." Shinji massaged the back of his sore neck as he leaned forward in Mister Kamakura's chair. "So…how're you feeling-"

"Like I effectively ended the lives of seven million, three-hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six-hundred and forty-two people."

He let her cry for a while.

* * *

"This is what they do, Mihiro," Shinji eventually explained. "They find out what they need from you, they do what they have to in order to get it. They use you. And when they don't need you anymore they throw you away and leave you with all the blame."

"They're really,_really_ good at it."

"Asuka's good at everything."

"But not good enough for you to go with her?"

Shinji hesitated, realizing Mihiro wasn't asking as much as she was flipping to the back of him to skim his catharsis. "I…just can't look at her, anymore."

"Then she will not ever bother you again."

"She'll always bother me."

Fabrics whispered as her edges pulled inward and reduced her in the darkness. "I hate this place."

"It's not like I'm holding you prisoner in your own house, but you really shouldn't go outside, and-"

"It's _over_, Ikari."

"You should be in here, anyway. For when your dad gets back and, who knows, that could be any second from now."

"You think so, huh?" Silent laughter briefly wracked her, but he persisted.

"Your mother could call. This is world news and I'm pretty sure they have phones in…um…"

"Toronto."

"Right."

"No…wait, she's in Brisbane, now."

"Okay. They have phones there, too-"

"Did I say Brisbane? I meant she's networking a tech symposium in Bristol. Silly me."

"But I thought she was in Bristol last month, why-"

His mother's face was a charcoal eclipse that God had smudged with an errant thumb. Her hands stretched down from the corona and

_Yes mommy yes this is more than enough_

he sighed, long and hard.

Mihiro went on.

"She's selling a proposal in, well, west of Taiyuan might not mean anything to you. Her flight was cancelled at Hartsfield-Jackson, they screwed up her itinerary in Marseille but she was like whatever, because she's got old girlfriends there and _lots_ of catching up to do. They thought she was sick, teacher, they quarantined her in Singapore thinking she had Troy Sullivans Type-B when it was really just Yeoman's Yellow Farts."

"…you made that up?"

Her head came up, her hand came down, and there was sound like a popped balloon.

"Of _course_ I made it up! Or do you really think she was held over for a night because there was ice on the wings in Bali?! _Bali!_ Why won't you rent a clue?!"

"You…you mean _buy_ a clue…?"

This was the part where she'd blink herself out of her stupor, fill the room with righteous, ephemeral light, and send him further away than any living man could possibly go. It had come out sounding like a joke at the expense of her mother. Shinji Ikari, castoff from a woman he'd never spoken to and a man he couldn't even look in the eye, making light of a thirteen year-old girl's dead parent. It was enough to make Mihiro smile. Because that was what she did.

"I was embarrassed," she said.

"Why?"

"Well, at first for_you_, actually." Mihiro wiped something invisible from her face. "I started making these stories up and waiting for you to _get it_, but you didn't. So I just made them dumber, and dumber, and dumber-"

"Okay."

"-and _dumber_."

"Alright. Okay."

"I swear to you. I started running out of material."

"I was just being polite," said Shinji. "It wasn't any of my business, and I was getting paid."

"Don't you mean,_PAID_?"

He laughed weakly, and maybe she joined him so he wouldn't feel so guilty about it. "That too," he said.

What little exuberance she had fizzled out. "I'm a coward..."

"No you're not. And don't be embarrassed. It's your dad's job to tell people things like this, not yours."

"He was a weak man, Ikari."

Oh.

His vision had adjusted by then and so had hers; she was looking at him. Or watching over him or looking through him. Shinji couldn't tell which, and was relieved when Mihiro finally rolled onto her back and interweaved her fingers behind her head. Before she could relax, her profile quickly turned curious. Offended. Horrified.

"What's that smell?" she wondered. "Is that you? Are _you_ that smell?"

"What smell?"

She reluctantly sniffed her armpit. And then stopped.

"Holy shit."

"I wasn't going to say anything." Shinji shrugged. "I probably need a bath just as bad."

"Hm." The dark air was filled with the sound of her not disagreeing with him. "Teacher?"

"Yeah?"

"You ran all the way here?"

"For the most part, yeah. Why?"

"Nothing…from _your_ place?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Nothing…really?"

"Yeah."

"Stop lying."

"Why would I lie about that?"

"I don't know…for real?"

"_Yes_. _Why?_"

"Nothing." She blinked. "Why didn't you just ride your bike?"

* * *

Epilogue

Hikari laughed.

Shinji didn't understand why, seeing as he'd only related a story about one of Kensuke's strange coworkers, and hadn't meant it to be funny at all. He was just filling the empty space between them, which seemed further than the distance between his Tokyo-3 and Keio University, nowadays. They'd been talking for ten minutes and Shinji still didn't know why.

He would think that she'd have the courtesy to at least try to make her laughter bright and buoyant, but Hikari never did. She had this way of making the sound go play outside with the other pudgy noise that lived down the street and sucked at life and Nintendo.

And if he had just heard right, Hikari also had pictures of Mana.

Shinji stood away from his light breakfast to weave in and out of his living quarters as he listened.

"They're not very many, Shinji. Eight. No. Ten."

"Ten is more than eight," he said.

"I realize that," she said. "It's just that she's not even the focus in half of them."

"But I don't have_any_ pictures of her."

"Well…okay," she breathed. He was putting the orange juice away and imagined her giving a conciliatory nod. "I actually thought you'd say that, but I just wanted to be fair and warn you."

"I think you're being more than fair."

"Not really. I have plenty of pictures. And I knew her. You can't really say the same."

"No…" He blinked at Friday's nascent daylight and either remembered to move or forgot to stay still.

After a wistful puff of static, she told him, "Good. Then I'll just send these out and they should get there by…when do you think, Tuesday?"

"If you mail them, sure, but I know where you live. I mean, I can just pick them up."

She doled out laughter again like it was a consolation prize. "Ikari, it's not a package or anything. Don't feel like you have to go out of your way for me, okay?"

"But you're doing me a favor."

"I _know_, Shinji."

"It's just going to bother me until I do something for you."

"You've already done enough."

"I…okay. Okay."

That was it.

As usual.

Shinji lowered the phone to the kitchen counter, having momentarily misplaced the receiver.

He was oddly resigned to the way he'd just been marginalized. Even in high school, when Asuka and Touji weren't warring between them, their friendship had never progressed past scripted lunchtime pleasantries. They read their lines and went to their trailers and had take two during clean-up duty. They both seemed content in their half-assedness, so why would it be any different, now?

Why would it be _better_, now?

For Hikari, there was always a project. Or a test. Or dinner to prepare. Or Kodama struggling to sound sincere before telling him that she'd stepped out. Oh no, Shinji, that's okay. She'll call _you_ back.

Shinji didn't want to spend time with Hikari as much as he wanted to keep the weight of her from swaying over his head. The problem was that she wouldn't talk to him long enough to allow that to happen.

In any case, he was satisfied with the company he kept, which consisted of Kensuke and his coworker, Shinji's roommate, and the soccer ball she had just punted into the sink. Which was brimming with dishes she had promised to wash. Six days ago.

After two years of living with her, Shinji didn't bother getting mad, anymore. Now, it just kinda happened all on its own.

"What did I tell you about kicking that ball in here?!"

"Something that I completely forgot," Mihiro chirped. She drifted in on an odd half-waltzing skip and bumped him as she removed the hex-checkered ball from the standing water. Shinji instinctively went to work uprooting her from his mind. She was always tacky to the touch that way.

"I don't even know why you have that thing," he wondered aloud. "You hate football."

"But I like _tripping_ people," Mihiro pointed out. "It's World Cup week in Phys-Ed, that Miyazawa tramp plays for class 1-C, and I'm gettin' while the gettin's good. She's fast, but she's got the reflexes of a dead cat."

"You just sound hungry to me. Have one of my muffins if you want."

"Pass." She stopped toweling off the ball to pat the hips of her plaid uniform skirt.

She was joking, right? Shinji was almost scared for her when she had started living with him, but that was before he realized she could eat her weight in flan. Apparently it all went somewhere, seeing as she had eventually grown up a few centimeters and grown out a few more.

"You look fine, Mihiro." She did. Honestly and truly.

She waved at him. "I'm not going CLAMP on you or anything. It's just that our homeroom's going to Ocean Dome next week and I'm wearing that two-piece. You know that red one?"

He looked away. "No."

"With the watermelon seed print?"

"No."

"And when I leaned forward you could see all the way to Okinawa?"

"_No_."

Her eyes bounced away and back to him before narrowing. "But you helped me pick it out."

"Fine, I remember,_okay_?" Mihiro grinned at his admission. She was beginning to like this game, which was dangerous. "I just hope you don't go around broadcasting that. Enough people talk as it is."

"Wait…about us?_Who?_"

"No one." Which would last about as long as a napkin in Sparerib Hell. "You know Mister Hamamoto? On the third floor?"

"You mean Humbert Humbert-san?!" She popped up from where she'd been leaning against the dinner table and crowed. "That old dirty bastard! He's just mad I'm legal. You shoulda seen the way he looked at me when I first moved in."

"You mean…_looking_ looking? Why didn't you say anything to me?"

"Because he's_harmless_, Ikari." She arranged a preemptive, apologetic smile. "You aren't."

* * *

Shinji fast forwarded through his breakfast, clearing the table, eyeing the dishes, email, caving in, washing the dishes. After he'd helped Mihiro find the navy blazer she was already wearing, she huffily took a comb to the hair that tumbled down her back in black-licorice wavelets; she hadn't bothered cutting or straightening it in months. Shinji organized a pile of architectural drawings that had grown increasingly renegade as the semester dragged on.

"Don't worry about walking me home," she said as she gusted behind him, presumably to her room. "I'm sorta meaning someone."

"Finally," he whispered.

"What do you mean_finally_?"

"I only-" Shinji turned and pulled back to avoid whipping his face through hers. It was a nice little trick, but after the eleventy-thousandth time he just wanted to know where she was getting all those fucking rabbits. "Do you have to stand so close when you do that?'

"What do you mean_finally_?"

"Nothing. You could stand hanging around someone your own age, that's all."

Her smile turned thin and smug. "But I didn't say he was my age, now did I?"

He shrugged. "You're a better judge of character than I am."

"You're doing a piss-poor job of preserving my chastity," she admonished.

"I'm not your dad, Mihiro."

Her eyebrows arced high as she shook her head. "You've got no idea how much that improves my estimation of you."

"Yes I do."

Being this close to her was like velcro snagging on his heart. Shinji would've been compelled to tell her his darkest secrets if she hadn't already known them all.

Mihiro turned to leave, slinging her satchel across her body as she hustled to the door. "Take an umbrella, teacher."

"I will."

"FYI, he's just a friend. A good guy. He just doesn't know it yet."

"That he's a friend or a good guy?" he asked.

"Both."

"Then _please_ don't break him down, like you did with what's-his-face. That was terrible. Try to have fun. Make it a good day."

"I'll make it a_great_ day…"

When Mihiro looked back, he just barely kept from frowning like he had guzzled an unpasteurized liter of chunky cat milk. It was just impossible to return that smile, broader than the border of her face. But it wasn't so much felicity as it was a show of force, and he knew it.

It _was_ going to be a great day. There wasn't much that Shinji Ikari or anyone else could do about it.

* * *

Shougeki-4 was an hour's drive from Tokyo-3. Each trip to the lake -because Kensuke thought that was what it was most like- was accompanied by hillside forestry and pulled-cotton clouds; layers of the world grinding past each other as he navigated the winding mountain blacktop between the rock walls. The final stone bend reliably peeled back to reveal water turned into orange, brackish wine in a basin a hundred meters below.

Kensuke had at times driven down the mountainside fast, other times slow. That only meant he had the choice of being quickly engulfed by the glittering amber mouth, or having time to think about all the people devoured there, their lives indefinitely suspended.

After looking out over the receding grass line of its trampled shore, over its fifty-million murky liters, Kensuke thought of the smell in much the same way that fish thought about drowning. He was posted there one day of the week, after all, and so was Itabachi, who was leaning heavily on his flimsy and load-bearing cubicle wall.

"What the hell kept you?" asked Itabachi.

Kensuke had been slumped in his desk chair for all of negative three seconds. Driving was prohibited on the west and south shores. His feet hurt, he was tacky from dried, salty sweat, and his feet hurt. But Itabachi knew how far he could lean on Aida, and he'd eventually give Kensuke the days-end minutes he had learned to cherish. All Kensuke had to do was indulge him.

"Yukimura thought he saw footprints today."

"No…" Itabachi pulled back with a snake-bitten look "_From_ the fucking lake? He's always finding shit up there, Aida. Why are you encouraging him?"

"I'm _not_. We document claims of sentient activity so that's what I did."

"And…?"

"It _was_ a footprint…" Itabachi refused to be baited. Kensuke sighed and oscillated in his desk chair, "from a DEPE-LCL diver. Yukimura forgot they were doing salinity tests."

Some small, petty triumph pushed up on the bigger man's cheeks like tent poles beneath a heavy tarp. Kensuke countered with a frown. Itabachi's expression appropriately dampened.

"What're you so happy about?" asked Kensuke. "It was an honest mistake and you seem to be the only person that doesn't want to make it."

"It's just depressing, man. Going up there and seeing everyone get there hopes up, you know? Nothing ever comes out of that place."

Kensuke was tired. "I was just doing my job."

"If you say so."

"I wasn't getting my hopes up."

"Chill. Alright."

They left it at that, letting the conversation drift down to less volatile reactants, like food, where to and with whom to consume it; Dinner, at Mimi's Café, and with Shinji in that order, because Kensuke had no strong desire to eat Shinji at Dinner with Mimi's Café. If Mihiro came, things would be only slightly less volatile. But she was cute. That mattered.

Matsuo reared back to peer outside of Kensuke's labor box before turning back. "I'ma get going. You should do your duty station report now. If you wait, you know Sayed's just gonna ask you at the ass-end of the day."

"I finished it at the lake."

"You see that candy-raping sonofabitch, you tell him the next time he touches my werthers I'm gonna sit on his face."

There was simply no way for Kensuke to convey just how less hungry he was thanks to what had been said. He could only blink until Itabachi blundered an explanation, and then skulked off.

He liked Itabachi, though he couldn't pinpoint why. Maybe Hikari had been on to something when she'd told him that every Moe and Larry needed a Curly. Maybe not. The important thing was Kensuke was now in the right frame of mind.

Aida pulled open the thin drawer below the monitor and the mad Technicolor logo bouncing across its dozing black screen. He saw a ruler, a pocket calculator and napkins embroidered with a 'C' that stood for chicken or cookies, he couldn't recall. Kensuke pulled back a layer. His eyes glazed over the March 2022 edition of Combat Magazine, the May 2021 edition of Combat Magazine, the October 2021 edition of Combat Magazine, January 2022 ed-_there it was_.

Kensuke picked it up, relaxed, and fingered its fraying edges.

The paper was now a tainted, dusky shade away from its christened white. It was coming apart at each of its fatigue creases. A sizeable corner had long been ripped away like an outlaw continent and mended at its fault with masking tape. The written words were slurred by damp fingers, muttered by fading ink, coerced by scribbled additions and subtractions.

It wasn't his, at first, had been destined to be evidence or sealed away forever as the personal effects of a disappeared. Neither had he planned on keeping it. That was all before everyone knew that what had happened two years ago had been bigger than Nerv or Tokyo-3. When reports of people crashing to the ground in tang puddles started filtering in from Korea, from Siberia, from trawlers lurching in the Bering Strait, Kensuke knew no one would give a damn about some anonymous missing stationary.

Shinji might have, seeing as it was originally addressed to him. However if the former pilot knew it existed, it was a secret he guarded with forgiveness and that burdened smile. And if Shinji _didn't_ know…

**Kensuke,**

**This is not-**

…it was much too late to give it back, now.

* * *

It poured hissing silver needles as Souichi Nakajima arrived on Eri Suzuki's front porch. He had come through the early evening deluge unscathed but for the damp bells of his slacks, the thin toolbox in his left hand, and the umbrella he was shaking free of crystal droplets. Miss Suzuki stepped aside to let him in, and looked out at her short soaked yard and the narrow alley beyond her property wall.

"Wow…" Her effacing smile airbrushed shallow lines of advancing age. "You could drown out there. You could've just rescheduled."

"The rain isn't a problem."

"Dedicated, are we?"

"Poor." He bent over to park his sneakers next to a pair of sandals at the foyer. "So yes, I'm very dedicated."

"I know what just what you mean," she laughed warmly, wringing her garden-gloved hands, "for a few months when I was in college -a long time ago, mind you- I was a waitress and a librarian, and a photographer at the same time. Money makes a mailman out of you when you don't have any."

"I suppose. Can you show me where it is?"

"Rain, sleet, and snow…" she ventured, "get it?"

"Yes. Can you show me where it is, please?"

Miss Suzuki ironed the creases out of her cheerful visage as they appeared, and nodded compliantly. Souichi paced her as she twittered with a graying lock of hair and pattered down the right wing of her house. Thunder drummed on the base skin of the Suzuki ancestral home as he locked eyes with the time-weathered portrait of a stout, mustachioed man. Then another.

"I'm…" She spoke without looking back. "I'm sorry if I was being presumptuous, Mister Nakajima."

"Do not-" He cut himself off, grimacing to himself. "Don't worry. I'm eager to get started, that's all."

"I see. So do you like playing pianos, too? Or just tuning them?"

"Both."

"Good!" She was beaming again. "Now I don't feel so bad about asking."

"Asking what?"

"I want you to teach someone…my sister's grandson."

"I don't teach."

"Oh. I didn't mean for free, of course."

"Of course. But I don't teach."

"Ah…" she mouthed. "That's too bad…"

The warmth had slipped from her for a second. Far too long for him not to have noticed.

"He…your great nephew plays?"

"Like a one-legged man runs a race," she laughed. "That's the problem."

She ventured into a room populated by a baby grand Yamaha piano and a small window high on the opposite wall which was broadcasting the wet and windy world. Miss Suzuki crossed the bare wood floor to run her fingers over its buxom case. She came away with a swath of dust that had settled over its rich walnut surface. Some glowing memory touched her thin lips as So looked on from the doorway.

"You know, I wouldn't even have bothered to have it fixed. But he can't stop pounding on it. I don't have the heart to stop him, and neither does Yomiko- that's my sister."

"But why are you asking me?"

"What do you mean? You're here now, aren't you? I like your rates." Eri poked the air between her and his neutral face. "I like _you_."

He shook his head, denying something only he knew was there. "You just met me."

"And just what does that have to do with anything, Mister Nakajima?"

Souichi stopped looking at her. "It's your family's piano, isn't it? If you're worried about the money, couldn't you ask a loved one?"

"That would've been my husband, who had _great_ fingers," she said, snapping her own. "And Shiro would've taught the boy, too. At least, when he wasn't screaming at him at the top of his lungs-"

"But he's gone."

"Very. Lung cancer. Being first was Shiro's _real_ talent, now that I think about it."

"I," His voice was scratchy, but he smoothed it out. "I wonder at a talent that deprives a wife of her husband. At the worth of it."

Eri Suzuki looked up, startled at the truth in Souichi's abysmal muddy eyes. "Now what would ever make you say such an obvious thing in such a profound way?"

"_My_ real talent," Layers of him recovered as he stared down at the grains of the storm-shadowed slats, "which is profundities that do nothing to improve the circumstances of those around me."

She nodded as her mouth migrated to her cheek in puckering contemplation. "Have you ever considered that maybe you just haven't met the right person yet to pawn all that wisdom off to?"

"Never."

"Well, if you ask me, and you're not but work with me here, 'never' is only going to last until you learn how to smile. Believe me, you're a very handsome boy." Eri approached him with a wide familial grin he couldn't match, and patted his shoulder as she slipped past. "She's all yours. I'll be in the greenhouse if you need me."

"I…very well."

Halfway down the hallway gloam, the graying woman glanced back. "And don't feel at all like you have to teach the boy. I was just throwing it out there. Alright?" The she stepped through a door at the end of the hallway.

"Alright. But in all honesty, I've recons-"

She closed it behind her.

Souichi's mouth hung open a moment after, and then with great deliberate slowness, closed it and sighed. He waited there as the summer rain tampered with the walls and rooftop. When nothing happened to him he stepped into the room, where the Yamaha was basking in the faded glory of refracted, storm-filtered daylight.

So hefted the toolbox onto the plain piano bench he had dragged from beneath the keyboard. The seat had chamfered edges with chipped enamel, hand and fanny prints in its layer of dust. He opened the keyboard cover and when eighty-eight wide coffee-stained dentures smiled up at him, Souichi pushed down on a discordant ivory tooth; it was a drunken middle-C that perished at the walls.

His fingers floated over similarly unkempt D's, F's and G-sharps before they settled on a plaquing A. He started there, propping open the piano lid and laying out two tuning forks, a hook-nosed tuning lever, and felt rolls of muting gauze from his kit.

So sat down and peaked over the rim, into the soundboard and the field of taut, disfrequented cords. The tuning pegs were tucked on the inner lip of the case like auxiliary teeth in a Tiger Shark, and he gripped the wooden haft of the tuning lever to play dentist.

The silver ratchet side of the lever clapped over the tuning peg. Souichi kept it there as he reached for the muting strips-

"Would you smile for_me_?"

-and groaned.

Mihiro blinked incuriously at his tired, pleading frown from where she sat.

"You should go," he started, deftly plucking the tuning fork from her sloppy hands. "This is neither my home, nor yours."

"Why don't you just tell her I'm your sister?" She grinned. Scooched over until their hips touched. "Or your girlfriend? She'd swallow that, I think."

"I wouldn't."

"Like I'd bother telling you such an obvious lie, _So_."

"Hm." Souichi unwrapped a length of muting strip, stood, and leaned into the soundboard to tend to a piano string. Until she kicked him. "What is it?"

"How much do you get paid for this? I'm just curious."

"It depends," he said.

"On what?"

He sighed. "Stuff."

"That's not a very good answer," Mihiro chastised. "It lacked…I don't know… words?"

"I'm busy, Mihiro."

"We're _all_ busy, Nakajima." Kamakura shook her head. "You're just lucky that I like you. I usually charge a flat rate when people blow me off."

"I've always wondered how much you were being paid to harass me."

"It's a labor of love, _So_." She testily poked him in the ass with a tuning fork. "And all I've done so far is asked if you'd turn that right side up frown upside down."

"I'll consider it if you stop tampering with my equipment -let _go_ of that- and display an once of self control."

Mihiro looked annoyed. "Hey, be fair. When I said you were blowing me off I so could've made a joke out of that." She folded her arms and muttered, "To say nothing of 'tampering with your equipment' while I stabbed you from behind with a cold, stiff, vibrating rod."

So placed the lever on a new tuning peg and removed and replaced the strips. "Hm," he said.

"Just admit it," she huffed, "I've changed. It's easy when you're held down and you have it forced on you."

"Don't say that."

Her good cheer was quickly and brutally squandered. "What?"

"Forget it." His words got small. "What I said. Forget it."

"I don't forget anything you say. Ever." She squinted at him as he tried to lose himself in routine. "What's the matter? Did you know what it was I was talking about? Was I preaching to the choir, _So_? Look at me."

"Stop saying my name like that."

"Is how people change one of those things you take notes on when you _watch_ us?"

"Mihiro…" Souichi paused and smirked awkwardly. "I see no need to get contemptuous."

"Too late," she declared loudly, "I'm offended now." Mihiro swung a leg over to straddle the dark wood bench. "Do _you_ even know why you can't be bothered to look at us without your microscope? Any time you handle us you have to wash your hands. Why, _So_?"

When he didn't answer she leaned in, eyes smiling and boring into his temple. "It wasn't like that when you first got here, was it? You didn't mind getting dirty. You liked fighting us, at least until you got a bloody nose. Be honest. You can't even be bothered to laugh or drink with or fuck us anymore."

"Those things," he murmured, "are none of your concern."

"Oh, sure they are," she volleyed. "I was one of those specimen. As their representative I'm asking you to put up your dukes or get the hell out of the ring, _So_. The truth is we don't need you. Eri Suzuki doesn't need you."

That last bit finally snagged him. He mirrored the indignation in her young face. "Is_that_ why you think that I'm here?"

"Of course not, no. You're here to tune a shitty piano. Earn your keep. You fix enough of them, maybe you can afford a new stupid human suit. Lord knows you're getting hot in _that_ one. Maybe I wouldn't notice if you were boring but you're a grand ol' porn and I _enjoy_ watching _you_."

The way she was watching him now.

He folded. Snapped away. Operated above the spruce soundboard. "I need to do this."

Mihiro flicked a limp wrist at him. "Go right ahead. Don't let _me_ stop you…_So_."

Something bulged in his slender jaw but he saved it. For a while, Mihiro let him work on the Yamaha, its harmony slowly but steadily behind restored, string by string. Thunder boiled down into the room while she regaled him with complete and silent attention.

For a while.

"Are you gonna help her out?"

"Perhaps," he answered, not looking up.

"Go for it. You need the money, though I don't understand why you don't just _take_ first chair violin for the TSO."

"I don't want to become conspicuous."

"What_ever_," she scoffed. "At the moment there's like, three people on Earth that know who you really are, and two of them are talking to you right now."

"You were saying why I should tutor her nephew?"

"You're patient."

Laughter before he could rein it in.

"Yes, yes, I'm an ass. Epiphanies on the cheap. Now seriously," Her eyes floated over the stained ivory keys, "how're you going to let the boy know what he's doing wrong?"

"I will speak Japanese to him. I'm good at that."

"And by _to_ you mean _at_, right?"

"You know what I mean, Mihiro, and I will not argue semantics with you."

"Semantics don't have anything to do with it. You needing a translator has everything to do with it."

A perfect, polished scoff. "_You?_"

"I don't see any other damn applicants," Mihiro said loudly, and her tinny voice echoed against the low ceiling. "You laugh, but you wanna know why you let me hang around you?"

"No."

"I can help you understand."

So shrugged and switched out the ratchet head of his tuning lever, but she held firm. "Why don't you try talking to me instead of talking me away? Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to remind yourself to use contractions every time you open your…"

She trailed off this time, staring at his back and sitting up like there was a wall between them she hadn't noticed before.

Mihiro frowned. "At least, it _would_, if you'd just let go of your stupid pride for a second and ask me straight up."

"I don't believe in pride."

"You were proud of Mana."

Souichi…stopped. When he turned around she could see the roots of his hair drinking up ephemeral silver though each black follicle. When he bent down to cast her in his shadow, she could see the scarlet outbreak migrating inward from the edges of his irises. She could see everything, he was so very close, and his voice spiraled down in a brutal hiss:

"**I keep you around for that shameful vestige in me that delights in your flailing attempts to amend the hearts of distant strangers, when you cannot even manage the **_**one**_** beating a door down from where you sleep. For that alone you are perfectly. Un. **_**Qualified**_"

And because he was so close, she could not hide the cracks in her oblivious façade. It was why he didn't notice her slamming the keyboard cover on his fingers. Which, in turn, was why he jumped up, danced a little pain dance, and was Souichi again. Who gritted his teeth to no avail.

"Sssssshhhhiiittt! THAT HURT!"

"One-up, fuck face! Now take it back!"

"Why should I do_that_?!"

"Because if you _don't_ apologize, I promise I'll never speak to you again."

"…I repeat. Why should I do that?"

Mihiro swiped irritably at half-shed tears. "You think about this, So."

Souichi could only mouth his blushing knuckles and glower from behind them. "I'm sorry," he blurted. "I will make it up to you-"

"You're telling me or you're asking me?" She pointed out, "there's a difference."

"No there is _not_!" At that point So just put his hands on his hips and craned his neck to see just how far he had fallen. When his eyes finally leveled with the girl, he smiled gloriously.

"Mihiro Kamakura. I realize that my words have unduly caused you great harm. How do _you_ wish for me to atone for my spectacularly rude and injurious behavior?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "Why don't you tell me?"

His face fell. "Get out."

"I don't see how me getting out makes up for _hey_!"

It wasn't token resistance Mihiro offered, but So easily wrenched her from her seat by the scruff of her school blouse collar. She flailed at his hip as they alternately plowed and stuttered down the dark hall.

"I just told you to think about this."

"I _have_."

"Who else is gonna talk to you, let alone know _how_, let alone go out of their way-"

"I will manage."

She tripped and recovered and grinned. "I'm sure Miss Suzuki will chat with you. There'll be tea and scones. She's such a nice, lonely bird."

"This is _not about her_!" he yelled as they careened into the wide wood entrance.

"Right, it's about you being so out of touch that you that's desperation in her eyes."

"Shut _up_."

"She _is_ ready to die, _So_, but only because she _had_ a love and sons and memories your floods can't drown and your wars can't trample-"

"SHUT UP!"

"-so that unless you rape her mind she's beyond sharing pity with _you_."

"GET OUT!"

So had the door open when he planted a hand in the small of her back and shoved her out onto the covered porch curtained by grey rain. Mihiro stumbled, but when the fluster bled out of her arms and legs she turned back to bask in the afterglow of her perverse victory.

"Poor little Souichi…all this time amongst the Lilum has made your heart fragile like gla-"

There was a sharp wooden crack as So slammed the shoji in her beaming face. He had managed to stop shaking by the time Miss Suzuki called out from the doorway to the greenhouse.

"Do you usually yell this much when you're tuning a piano, Mister Nakajima?"

"Sorry… I had, I'd injured myself. It's nothing serious."

"Don't be afraid to ask for something if you need it."

"I don't."

"Shit smack. Don't be a tough guy. I'm going to get rid of those bandages one way or another."

"I don't need anything."

"Oh. Okay…" Eri Suzuki and the greenhouse light silently withdrew. He did as well, shuffling back to the room, where the piano and the window and Mihiro were sitting.

"Guess what? I know how you can make up for being a he-douche!" She clapped her hands and greedily rubbed them together for emphasis.

Nakajima put his hand together, too. "If I were to do this," His Adam's apple lurched buoyantly, "would you then give me peace…?"

"Yes."

* * *

The sky stormed away at ever-longer intervals. For a time, dust motes that had been cloaked in overcast burned white in the uncovered sun. He let Mihiro appraise something behind his eyes as he performed off-key test renditions.

After the seventh test, ash-colored clouds once again stirred closer. The dust slowly flickered off like dying galaxies as the shade grew malignant, then expanded and pooled as the afternoon relapsed. The world clapped and the old house shuddered. Warped waterfall projects cascaded over So's slight form as he collected his tools, snapped the plastic case closed, and stored it beneath the Yamaha.

He eyed Mihiro suspiciously even as he eased himself next to her.

"I thought you played the cello," he said.

"That too."

"And the viola."

"That too."

His eyes dashed to the left and right of her. "Well? What is it that you want to play?"

"I don't know. Pick. _You're_ the penis."

"Pianist."

"You heard me." Mihiro glanced at the wristwatch she wasn't wearing. "Look, are we making beautiful music together or what? I'm all for this existential bonding crap, but if I miss out on Shinji's fresh tempura, you and I are gonna have issues."

Nakajima went still, and then thawed decisively. "Brahms. Fifteen. A-Flat Major."

* * *

I think I hear music.

I go outside, and I'm not surprised when flowers and melody sail in on a breeze. I have all the time in the world to kill. Or none of it, but I enjoy the sounds, the grass beneath my bare feet, and the apple all the same.

I really don't think that I need food here, but then again I don't need a bathroom. They both came with the house. It just wouldn't be right if I didn't get full use out of it, so I take advantage of the stocked fridge and make due.

Ew. That was bad. Mihiro's rubbing off on me.

That would make a strange sort of sense, seeing as she helped me build the place. My grandmother's home was a split foyer with terra cotta siding and a fired clay roof. Exactly like this one. There's even a driveway that curls around to the back, and we both kinda laughed at that.

The driveway empties out into the main road, which is always freshly paved and cuts down the hill that gently slopes into nothing…which we covered up with some trees, and a stream overarched by a cobblestone footbridge. We laughed some more until she said I won't be the day a car winds up the road to pick me up. She told me she wasn't old enough for a license, that someone else would have to be driving.

That's fine with me, now.

So long as he wipes his feet, removes his shoes, and stays away from Nana's door, which has always been shut because I'm afraid she's behind it. I just couldn't deal with that. I know the day I'm not able to deal with things is the day I lose the house. It's nearly happened twice, already. It's no secret that I am bankrupt in companionship here, so Mihiro visits often enough to stave off foreclosure.

Plenty of people _want_ to get in. But I know they'd eat up all my food, take my radio and my pictures, they'd open Nana's door, turn on the gas and light a match, and then I'd have no choice but to stay outside with them.

That would be the end of me.

The only person I've let in is Yukie. The problem was she was never comfortable, and at first I thought it was all the pictures I had of Shinji. Or the ones of what I want to do to Shinji. I turned them down and away the next time she'd visited and I still found myself asking what the hell it was she kept muttering under her breath.

"_So quiet_." Then she'd rock forward on the edge of Nana's couch and rub her hands over her starched pants legs. "_Aren't you cold?_"

So I buried her in comforters and chided her when she apologized for asking me to turn the heat up. Like I pay bills or something.

The last time I saw Yukie she thanked me for the ravioli and closed the front door behind her. She took my damn wool hat, too, but I knew better than to follow her out.

But now? _Now_ now? It feels good outside. Ripples of sunlight blow over the graded field as I breathe in flowers and mus-no, wait. It stopped.

I give the finger to the part of me saying I sigh with far more dejection than I actually feel. How's _that_ for honesty, Adulthood? Pretense is as good as million-yen notes here, seeing as it's only me.

At last.

The apple seeds are capsulated bitter concentrate. I spit them out and almost drop the core where I stand, but the trashcan came with the house. I turn to go inside, laughing in the exact way I won't be the day pretense and money are good again.

Just wipe your feet, remove your shoes, and stay away from Nana's door. You'll be just fine.

* * *

Mihiro squared up to accommodate So's crumpling face as he buried it in her shoulder, huffed and sputtered.

He cried harder.

"I told you we make beautiful music together…"

End of Normal to Reality

A/N: Eh. I can do better.

Random A/N: That being said, I thank everyone who stuck it out, and I hope you enjoyed it. Before I get on with my next story I'm going to revisit Dinner Time and do a tiny bit of plastic surgery. Thanks to sedemihcrA for post-reading that story and subsequently beating the Disney out of me. Thanks to everyone who provided me words of encouragement. I hope to do better next time.

Thank you for reading and your criticism. Ja.

Next Project: Valley Girl


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